Once again Veeam has been recognized as one of Microsoft’s top global partners for 2017, achieving Finalist ranking for Application Development, Partner of the Year Award. As a Partner of the Year Award Finalist, Veeam is being honored for our continued innovation within the Veeam Availability Suite and for being one of the most successful ISV partners in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace with five certified VMs.

It’s no secret that HPE has gone through some painful changes over the past years, but this was all by design to morph the old HPE into a whole new HPE company that is poised to meet the needs of the new IT customer. Bill Philbin stated that customers will see this new HPE starting at HPE Discover in June, “You’ll see a whole new HPE company, just like a phoenix, we’re building a brand-new company because we made the hard decisions in the past year and now we are right-sized to move forward.”

VeeamON 2017 was the birthplace for many important products and features that will shape Veeam’s strategy for delivering a seamless digital life experience to businesses across the world.

There are many new things coming to Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Availability Platform, all of them designed to help organizations stay Always-On in multi-cloud environments. As always, Veeam innovated and delivers a complete range of functionalities to fit every data Availability need across virtual, physical or cloud environments.

VeeamON 2017 may be over, but we still have a lot to be excited about! During the three-day conference, we announced several new offerings and programs to drive even greater partner services revenue and engagement – one of which is the new Veeam Accredited Service Partner (VASP) program for North America.

Veeam produces the world’s best Availability solutions. Over the last two years, our customers have become increasingly interested in Availability solutions in the cloud, specifically in Microsoft Azure. Veeam has always been and continues to be hardware agnostic. We always let our customers choose their preferred hardware, or in this case cloud provider. With that said, Veeam has built six show-stopping innovations for our customers who are looking to use Veeam with Microsoft Azure to strengthen their Availability story in the hybrid cloud.

It’s been about a month since Veeam’s annual user and partner conference VeeamON, which was held in New Orleans, Louisiana this year. I’m still missing the casual, free spirited vibe of the Big Easy and of course New Orleans-style Cajun cooking.

If you’ve ever been to New Orleans, you’ve probably seen Tabasco hot sauce on the tables at practically every restaurant. I’m a firm believer that hot sauce makes good food taste even better and such is the relationship of Cisco and Veeam.

Close to seven years ago, Veeam and Quantum came together to offer Veeam Backup & Replication as a tested and validated software for interoperability with Quantum DXi Series network attached storage (NAS) backup appliances. Enhanced support for any deduplication appliance, including Quantum DXi appliances, was included with Veeam Availability Suite v9. And with Quantum’s recent announcement, our partnership continues to expand and evolve.

In the digital age, data is gold. With global data growth projected to reach 180 zettabytes by 2025, we are on the threshold of a digital gold rush of epic proportions. The challenge is how do you extract the most value out of your digital assets when data is disbursed across on-premises and public-cloud infrastructures? Likewise, how do you ensure the Availability of your critical business applications and data in an increasingly hybrid-cloud world?

Maria Olson, VP of Strategic Alliances at NetApp and Andy Vandeveld, VP of Alliances at Veeam, discussed how NetApp and Veeam are helping organizations like the Denver Broncos, Telefonica and many others with their digital transformation initiatives.

If you use VMware vRealize Log Insight in your environment for log consolidation and analysis, you will be pleased to know that you can now obtain a Content Pack from Veeam to empower your backup admins. This means your admins can stay in the Log Insight and see even more useful information. This will also help your backup admins more easily confirm if a backup issue is in fact a network issue or a storage issue. It is nice to note that I believe we are the first data protection company with a Content Pack in the Log Insight Marketplace.

Someone asked me, “What does this mean?” I thought that might be a good place to start this off. VMware vSAN is one of the very exciting features of VMware vSphere in that it provides software defined storage. The power of this is you can install ESXi and vCenter, and if your hosts have a mix of SSD and HD disks or just SSD, you can enable vSAN with only a few clicks and you then have shared storage among all your hosts.