Backup

Veeam introduced yet another new product in 2017, in the form of Veeam PN. When it was first introduced at VeeamON 2017, it was a Release Candidate (although quite functional). Yesterday Veeam announced that the product is now Generally Available (GA), which basically means it is a “true” product. But, what does this mean for Veeam? For the bulk of Veeam’s life, it has been a data protection company, and it has, and still does, perform exceedingly well in the market. But with Veeam PN, Veeam is now getting into the networking game. But why? ...

Please note that this post is sponsored by NAKIVO. Although it is sponsored, the topics and words below are written on my own accord, and they are not those of NAKIVO. There is no shortage of data protection products on the market these days. In fact, there probably has never been a more favorable time for consumers to find a solution that is a fit for them. But in such a crowded market, there can be a lot of considerations one has to make. Do you need to protect multiple hypervisors? What about replication? Do you have workloads in AWS? ...

A big thank you to the 50+ attendees who made it out to the Q3 SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) yesterday. As always, it is great to see returning faces, as well as new folks. The one downside I find personally as the group grows is it is hard to chat with everyone. Not a bad problem to have though! We were also fortunate enough to have Paula Melvin from Veeam’s Ohio office come up for the event. In addition to that, the Guest of Honour was Vanny Vanguard - the “unofficial, official mascot of the Veeam Vanguard” (pictured above). ...

I’ve been using Veeam Backup for Office 365 since somewhere around November 2016. Being part of the Vanguard program, I was afforded an early glimpse at it. I quickly found that I was getting some great use from having it though. Although generally smooth, I do occasionally run into issues. Most recently, I ran into an interesting error message while exporting a mailbox: Unable to read beyond the end of the stream. Definitely not an intuitive message, however it does sound like some sort of read issue. Being the type of person that I am, I immediately took a look to see if I could fix things myself before evoking support. ...

As many readers of my blog know, I run the SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG), so it was very welcomed when Rick Vanover reached out to me earlier this year regarding a new initiative. Although there are Veeam User Groups located all over the world, they can sometimes be hard to come by. Issues like scheduling or transportation might get in the way and stop you from attending. With that in mind, Veeam is putting together their first online Veeam User Group, and I am honoured to have a presenting spot. ...

One of the big draws towards any cloud-based storage is expandability: you aren’t responsible for maintaining drives, adding shelves, or even for the cooling and caring of the arrays. The biggest downside is typically speed. Moving data to the cloud usually means that what used to be sub-millisecond to access can now take significantly longer. ClearSky Data saw this challenge and wanted to provide a solution. We went for a bit of a deep into their storage offering at Tech Field Day 14 in order to get a better understanding of how their platform works. ...

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. ...

A slew of announcements came out yesterday via partner day, and if you were following along on Twitter, you hopefully caught some of them. Today though, with the general session, we dove into those a bit more. I’ll recap those announcements in this post, with a bit of a high-level overview. Expect to see some more in-depth posts on some of these features in the near future. Before we jump into the announcement, I wanted to focus on Veeam’s messaging. Over the past little while, there has been a definite shift in the messaging: what was once Backup & Recovery, is now all about Availability. Availability means that’s organizations will keep running, regardless of disaster. As Peter McKay put it “Poor experience is just as bad as no experience”. Veeam is focusing on keeping business running, no longer are we in a position where companies want to react to disasters, rather business now needs to make disasters non-disruptive through proactive planning. ...

ClearSky Data was founded in 2014 with the goal of simplifying primary storage by turning it into an on-demand service. They set out to accomplish this by leveraging both on-premises and cloud technologies, and by tossing a bit of flash storage in there, they came up with a fairly nifty solution. LIVING ON THE EDGE Prior to being invited to Tech Field Day 14, the name ClearSky Data did not ring a bell, but some research has turned up an interesting product / service offering. What ClearSky Data offers is a tiered storage solution: an on-premises appliance (handily enough called the Edge), warm storage (located ’nearby’), and cold storage (AWS S3). The Edge appliance, which is the caching / performance tier, is located alongside your compute. It contains a pool of up 24TB raw of flash storage used for caching hot data and can scale up to four appliances. ...

I love talking about Veeam with folks, whether it is at a VMUG, the Veeam User Group I run, or even over a couple of drinks. Many of these talks lead to folks finding out about features that may not be all that well known (and for the record, it is not uncommon for me to find out something new). For example, did you know that Veeam Backup & Recovery has a vCenter plugin? Do you know what version it was released in? (the answer is V7). ...