Veaam’s Azure Focus Is Strong at VeeamON 2017

The second keynote during VeeamON started off with a strong focus on “cloud”, so much so that we were greeted by Paul Mattes, Vice President – Global Cloud Group. Between both keynotes, we saw lots of numbers and stats thrown out, which I usually don’t take much value in. However, what is noteworthy is that the stats illustrated tremendous growth via revenue, customers growth, and the number of companies using cloud technologies.

Veeam PN

The first “suite” introduced was Veeam Disaster Recovery in Microsoft Azure, which consists of two components: an appliance running in Azure (which will be available in the marketplace) and an appliance that runs on the client side, and there can be multiple client sides. By leveraging the existing “Direct Restore to Azure” feature, Veeam PN allows you to create routing rules between your site and Azure so that traffic is automatically translated between sites.

In my opinion, this is a huge release. This really allows you to have a DR site AND connectivity to that site, without having to lay out a bunch of capital. If you have a file server at a branch office that goes offline, you can now bring it up in Azure and folks will automatically be routed to that new location. Keep in mind that Veeam Agent for Windows can also be instantly restored to Azure as well … this might be a good way to keep those remote, physical workloads available despite hardware failure. Right now Veeam PN is just a Release Candidate and not ready for General Availability yet. Oh, and it will be free 🙂

Azure Blob Storage & Office 365

Next up, we jumped back to the cloud storage demo used in a SoBR configuration that we saw yesterday. Given the strong Microsoft partnership that Veeam has, we finished this demo off by having Michael Cade show us how to add Azure blob storage. The actual adding of the Azure blob storage was just a few clicks through a wizard.

Keeping up with Microsoft partnership, we touched very briefly on Veeam Management Pack v8 update 4. That however quickly spun us into the announcement that Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 1.5 will be released shortly. Scalability was a key consideration when designing this build, so they have added the ability to use proxys to spread out the load. For larger organizations, adding multiple helpers should definitely help minimize run times.

Another addidion that I was excited to hear as that automation is now available via PowerShell or via a RESTful API. As someone who has been using more and more PowerShell, if I can script something, I’ll usually take the time to do it. I’m looking forward to tinkering around with this.

One of my complaints with the product is that it only backs up Exchange Online, so it isn’t a true Office 365 tool. There is a long forum thread in the Veeam community forums which revolves around feature requests adding SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business support. So it was welcome news after the v1.5 demo that we were told that version 2 would include support for these two platforms. That was met with a round of applause. Given that OneDrive for Business uses SharePoint under the covers, I’m not shocked that Veeam was able to kill two birds with one stone here.

All in all, we can definitely see a strong partnership between Veeam and Microsoft, specifically on the Azure side. The ability to leverage cloud technologies, whether it be storage, compute, or network, is welcomed news to many organizations. One of the biggest benefits is being able to just spin these technologies up when needed, thus avoiding large capital costs for equipment that may not be used.