Building on an already strong Service Provider Platform
For nearly 10 years Veeam has supported our service provider partners with industry-leading, innovative features that allows them to build product and service offerings based on Veeam Backup & Replication technologies and also the Veeam Platform as a whole. Many of the features and enhancements that we have released over that time have been leveraged by our partners to offer their own customers and partners reliable, flexible and simple solutions that address a wide array of backup and data availability requirements.
As can be seen by this VCSP Reverse Roadmap Veeam has been accelerating the volume of features (and products) that our Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partners can leverage. Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4 was a huge release for service providers with a number of top-line enhancements and features added which partners were able to take to market and improve their already strong service offerings.
What’s in v10 for Service Providers?
When looking at the run-down of v10 features and enhancements, you may not immediately see the value for service providers… but that’s only if you aren’t looking closely. In fact, of the 100+ new features and enhancements, a good number of them can be taken and used to enhance existing offerings, while others may be used to create new revenue streams.
Some of our leading features for this release including Cloud Tier, NAS File Backup and Enhanced Instant VM Recovery, three exciting new capabilities in v10 that you can read up on here, here and here. All three can be leveraged for service provider use.
However, for this post, I’ll be focusing on the following:
- Enhanced Linux File-Level Recovery
- Cloud Tier Enhancements
- Linux Backup Proxy
- Data Integration API
- vCloud Director SSP Enhancements
Enhanced Linux File-Level Recovery
File-Level Recovery is something that service providers do often as it’s one of the more common service desk requests that is come across. The recovery of a single file or folder can be problematic, especially when Linux Operating Systems (OS) are involved. In v10, we can now leverage network-less guest processing that works through the VMware vSphere guest interaction API (formerly known as VIX API). This allows file- level restores even when direct network connection to the VM cannot be established.
When no network access is detected, the connection into the guest OS will be established through the ESXi host. This brings it up to speed with Windows File-Level Recovery Operations and works for traditional Infrastructure as a Service and vCloud Director workloads.
Linux Backup Proxy
Veeam’s data mover is the Backup Proxy, and before v10 this needed to be installed on a Windows server or workstation. The majority of service providers that operate at scale would deploy a number of Windows Servers to act as Backup Proxies into their platforms. In v10 we have added the ability to use Linux as the operating system for the Backup Proxy role. Initially supporting Debian, Redhat and Ubuntu, this allows providers to save on the licensing costs of Windows while improving overheads of deployment and management when comparing Windows to Linux TCOs.
It’s important to note that there is very little performance penalty if any when using a Linux Proxy over a Windows Proxy which makes the use case even more compelling.
Data Integration API
The Data Integration API is a bit of a hidden gem, one which service providers can build service offering around. The basic concept of it is to effectively activate otherwise stagnant backup data that sits in repositories waiting to be used in the case of a recovery emergency.
With this feature, service providers can offer services that make that data more valuable to customers or tenants. With the ability to mount backed up volumes to a Windows box, service providers can use third-party tools and applications to analyze the data and draw out information that could relate to compliancy, security or even preemptively detect viruses and ransomware – opening the door for a number of value-added managed service offerings.
vCloud Director Self Service Portal
Support for VMware’s vCloud Director SSP was released with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5, and with the release of v10 we have added much of the new v10 core functionality into the portal by way of allowing tenants to configure GFS retention and choose points vs days on their primary backup jobs. These are small, but important enhancements that allow tenants to be more granular and allow for longer-term retention which they can configure themselves through the portal.
This is a small but powerful list of key v10 enhancements that service providers can take advantage of along with the three headline v10 features. If you drill down into the What’s New Document, you will find many more that can be applied to be used for enhancing service provider offerings. We have always been confident that our partners will do great things with our technical capabilities to create platform differentiators.
With these innovative additions to v10 plus the 100+ more features not listed, it’s clear that Veeam remains the leader in the service provider backup space. Our VCSP partners are able to continually enhance service offerings while generating new streams of income with every major release. v10 is just the start, with future releases like Veeam Service Provider Console v4 and service provider readiness of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure on the horizon. There’s no better time to partner with Veeam!”
Veeam Backup & Replication v10 is now Generally Available and can be downloaded here.