Veritas CloudPoint aims for multi-cloud data protection

Veritas Technologies upgraded its CloudPoint snapshot management software, adding versions that integrate with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

With the update, Veritas CloudPoint 2.0 can protect data across multiple clouds.

Veritas launched CloudPoint 1.0 in 2017 as part of the company's next-generation data protection orchestration software for cloud-native web applications and workloads. Veritas CloudPoint takes application persistent snapshots that remain available until deleted for aggressive data recovery goals.

CloudPoint 2.0 launched this week adds enterprise features, including classification and deletion of personally identifiable information, automated discovery and backup, and granular search and recovery. The new version supports Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon Aurora, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, VMware vSphere, and Pure Storage and Dell EMC Unity arrays.

Veritas CloudPoint 2.0 for Microsoft Azure is integrated with Azure's snapshot technology to support multi-region capabilities and policy-based snapshots. It also has new cataloging capabilities to help find and restore a single data file. CloudPoint 2.0 for Google is available in Google Cloud Launcher and works natively with GCP for granular search and recovery and agentless protection of GCP instances.

Veritas CloudPoint software is distributed as a Docker container image built on Ubuntu Server Long Term Support base image. The image contains all CloudPoint services.

Phil Goodwin, IDC's research director of the storage systems and software group, said what makes CloudPoint significant is it's a cloud-first data protection product unlike its traditional data protection applications.

"This is an entirely different product from NetBackup and Backup Exec," Goodwin said. "It's entirely designed for use in the cloud. This is a cloud-first data protection product as opposed to retrofitting existing products in that environment."

Alex Sakaguchi, Veritas' senior director of cloud solutions marketing, said many Veritas customers run a mix of on-premises and public cloud configurations. This complicates the data protection and recovery process because each cloud has its own replication and snapshot technologies. That makes it important for data management applications to support multiple clouds.

"IT is continuing to evolve, but what is not changing is how organizations are ensuring their data is protected," Sakaguchi said.

Goodwin said CloudPoint's application persistent snapshot capability is important for data integrity during the recovery process.

"When you do snapshots, you have [a recovery point objective] of 15 minutes," he said. "So you lose up to 15 minutes of data. The application needs to be aware that the RPO is 15 minutes so it knows to roll back to a consistent point."