The release of Veeam Backup & Replication v9.5 U4 earlier this year introduced Veeam Cloud Tier, a new feature allowing our customers to leverage object storage for long-term retention of their backups. The feedback from customers has been overwhelmingly positive. In true Veeam fashion “it just works.” Veeam Cloud Tier depends on Scale-out Backup Repository, or SOBR as we like to call it. Veeam Cloud Tier makes SOBR infinitely scalable because, in the end, that’s one of the promises of cloud infrastructure.
With Veeam Cloud Tier, SOBR is now comprised of two components – a performance tier and a capacity tier. The performance tier is for your most recent backups providing immediate availability for fast restore or other uses such as leveraging Data Labs. The capacity tier is where customers take advantage of object storage, whether via an on-premises object storage platform or a public cloud object storage service to drive down overall costs and simplify management of long-term backup retention. Veeam Backup & Replication automatically moves data from the performance tier to the capacity tier based on a user-defined policy.
The Veeam Ready program has existed for several years, offering Veeam Alliance Partner Program members the opportunity to test their own file, block and tape storage infrastructure platforms with Veeam Backup & Replication. While not a certification program, Veeam Ready provides a higher level of confidence to our joint customers that our products will interoperate and perform well together in a production environment.
The Veeam Integrated program is related to Veeam Ready, but is reserved for storage solutions that have specific product integrations with Veeam Backup & Replication. These solutions have been tested rigorously by Veeam R&D. This additional rigorous testing entitles these platforms to state they have achieved Veeam Ready status. Capabilities such as the Veeam Universal Storage API require storage alliance partners to not only test their solutions initially, but also require ongoing testing to ensure compatibility with new features or functionality, hence the Veeam Integrated distinction was created.
Today we are officially extending Veeam Ready via a new category: Veeam Ready Object. As its name would imply, this category is specifically reserved for native object storage platforms. Veeam Ready Object allows our alliance partners with an object storage product or service to test against Veeam Backup & Replication and validate both feature and performance compatibility. This applies to both on-premises deployed object storage platforms as well as cloud object storage services.
This was all made possible once object storage support was included in Veeam Backup & Replication in January 2019. We shared with our alliance partners an S3-compatible API specification that enabled them to do their own integration with our beta releases and later, the generally available version of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4. Additionally, we developed tight integration with several public cloud object storage services – namely Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, and IBM Cloud Object Storage. These three services are considered Veeam Integrated, but we know there are many object storage platforms to choose from and wanted to be sure to offer our customers a choice, similar to how Veeam has worked with on-premises storage partners.
We’re excited that, with the official launch of this new category, there are 12 inaugural partner solutions which have successfully verified their object storage offerings meet the provided requirements. I encourage you to explore the partners and platforms which have met these requirements and are considered Veeam Ready today. We have several other partners who are in the process of testing and I encourage you to check the Veeam Ready solutions site for the most recent information.
We know to expand our leadership in Cloud Data Management, that we must continue to deliver new major capabilities, deliver cost effective data retention, easy cloud migration and data mobility, and cloud-native backup and protection. But while capabilities for the major public clouds are exciting, a recent Gartner survey of public cloud users found that 81% of respondents are working with two or more providers.[1] The reasons are various, but the evidence is clear: it’s a multi-cloud world. We encourage you to confidently leverage the new Cloud Tier feature in Veeam Backup & Replication with our ever-growing list of verified partners.
[1] Goasduff, Laurence. Why Organizations Choose a Multicloud Strategy. Gartner, May 2019