Did you know that on Thursday February 26, Veeam Backup & Replication turns 7 years old! It was first previewed publically during VMworld Europe in 2008. Doesn’t that seem like so long ago? Veeam Backup & Replication was announced on February 26, 2008 and then generally available on March 3, 2008. We are now on v8 and 2015 will have some BIG THINGS coming, so get ready!
Back in 2008. Instant file-level recovery works like magic!
Let’s take a look at what between then and now. While myself, this is my fifth year at Veeam; some people have been here since the beginning. Give a look to this YouTube video taken at the Veeam stand in Cannes from that event. The person giving that demo is Max Ivanov and is now in charge of the Veeam.com website. And how about way in the back, did you see anyone familiar? That’s right, it’s Doug Hazelman! VMDoug was Veeam’s very first SE.
I also got a quote from one of our support managers who still remembers the early days. One of the most popular requests was a button to stop a backup job. It sounds funny, but v1 didn’t have a stop button. At the time, the logic was sound. “Why would you not want to take a backup?” or “Why did you run the backup then?”
It’s fair to say that we have come a long way, but v1 brought a lot of good things to the virtualized data center that still enhance availability:
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2-in-1: backup and replication
- Instant File-Level Recovery
- Built-in deduplication
- Synthetic full backups
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Replication multiple restore points
Bring it on! Veeam puts innovation with every release
Even today when I speak to customers and partners at events and meetings around the world, some of these still make the difference in the discussion. The synthetic full backup, for example, is a very powerful technique that can reduce the impact of taking a backup from a primary storage perspective. Also the fact that the backups are agentless with Veeam since v1 can still make the difference today. You may have seen the now famous “reverse roadmap” but when you look at the changes at the time; it is somewhat interesting to see how fast we’ve moved over the years:
In 2010, the vPower era came and in many regards put Veeam on the map. Instant VM Recovery, Virtual Labs and more came in v5. Instant VM Recovery is a patented and proven high speed recovery technique and it will turn 5 years old in October of this year! I love this Tweet (reproduced with permission) about Instant VM Recovery:
v6.1 brought us Free Edition and has been a great gift to the community, home labs and those who are in the process of doing better things with their data center availability. I love this Tweet (reproduced with permission) from a few years ago when Veeam Backup Free Edition came out:
The Forefront of Availability
Fast forward to today and we have made some significant strides. Personally, my favorite “modern era” feature of Veeam Backup & Replication are the Veeam Explorers. And in particular, Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots is my most favorite. By the way, all of the Explorers are available in Veeam Backup Free Edition. I love how Veeam is committed to having a free edition for Backup. v8 was released in November, and in the 3 months since it has been updated 45,000 customers have upgraded. One of our core values is Veeam Speed (I coined the term, by the way!) and this is an example of our customers moving at Veeam Speed to get to v8 quickly!
By the numbers, Veeam also is doing very well. We recently published the annual growth and company facts for the end of 2014. We’ve now surpassed 135,000 paid customers and 29,000 ProPartner resellers worldwide. If I were to thank 10 customers a day in person, working 200 days a year, it would take me over 67 years to thank everyone. But on behalf of the entire Veeam, we couldn’t have done it without our customers and partners. In fact, the birthday wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for our customers and partners.
Without a doubt, Veeam Backup & Replication is a very powerful product and can define availability for many organizations. Last October we hosted VeeamON 2014; the first event dedicated to data center availability. VeeamON 2015 promises to be an even more spectacular event (hope to see you there!).
2015 will see more incredible capabilities for Veeam Backup & Replication. We haven’t started the promotion cycles yet, but you will like what you see. When did you first see Veeam Backup & Replication? For me it was v3 as an end-user. How did that experience go for you? Share your comments below.