Veeam hopes to capitalize on what it's calling the next major shift in IT with the integration of Kubernetes data protection into its backup software platform.
The Veeam repository integration for Kasten K10 provides customers with a central location for storing backups of Kubernetes workloads.
Danny Allan
"We are now going through the next decade of transformation," said Danny Allan, Veeam's CTO and senior vice president for product strategy, at the vendor's virtual VeeamON user conference Tuesday. "We believe it is based on containers."
The focus on containers, for which Kubernetes provides management, follows a decade heavy on virtualization, Allan said. Veeam started out specializing in backup for VMware but has since expanded to cloud, physical and now container-based protection.
Containers are designed for portability and consumption economics, Allan said.
How Kasten will blend with Veeam
Veeam acquired Kasten, a provider of backup and disaster recovery for Kubernetes, in September 2020. Earlier in 2020, Insight Partners acquired Veeam, transitioning it from founder-led to private equity ownership.
"It gives us a bigger currency to go after acquisitions," Veeam CEO William Largent said at the event.
Veeam had pledged to keep Kasten's K10 product available on a standalone basis but also integrate it with the Veeam backup software platform.
We are now going through the next decade of transformation. We believe it is based on containers.
Danny AllanCTO and senior vice president for product strategy, Veeam
From a technology standpoint, the acquisition is going according to plan, Allan said. The integration will be generally available later this year, likely in the third quarter.
"Similar to our cloud products, Kasten K10 will always remain available as a standalone application," Allan said. "However, over time, Veeam will enable deeper and deeper integration."
Users will be able to take a backup with K10, send it into a Veeam repository and benefit from all of Veeam's capabilities, such as monitoring and recovery, Allan said.
The integration offers a range of supported targets, including on premises and in the cloud, said Krista Macomber, senior analyst at Evaluator Group.
"This provides a lot of flexibility for Kubernetes backups, including lower-cost and more retention-focused repositories, as well as ransomware protection through immutability," Macomber said.
In April, Kasten launched version 4.0 of its K10 platform, which offered ransomware protection native to Kubernetes, including immutability against attacks.
It's also important that Veeam will integrate the container sources protected by Kasten into its automated data lifecycle management policies, according to Macomber.
"For IT, container environments really need to be an extension of the existing environments that are protected, for simplicity of management," Macomber said.
Kasten K10 can write to Veeam storage repositories for centralized data management including disk, solid state, object storage, cloud and tape.
Version 6 of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, due this year, will provide a self-service portal. End users will be able to recover their own email, for example, if given that control.
"Self-service enables users to be self-sufficient and it frees up IT to focus on other tasks," Allan said.
Veeam also added an archive tier to its backup software. Customers can create secondary copies directly from object storage to Azure Archive, Amazon S3 Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive.
"It allows customers to use the cloud for longer-term data retention, more cost-effectively," Macomber said.
In the last version of its 365 product, Veeam added native Microsoft Teams backup and recovery. There are 145 million daily active users of Teams, a number that increased dramatically in the last year with the shift to remote work.
Also this year, Veeam will release updates to its products that protect data in the top three hyperscale clouds -- AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Allan noted that 18 months ago, Veeam didn't have any products in the cloud marketplaces. It has launched six products and updates since -- three versions of Backup for AWS, two versions of Backup for Microsoft Azure and the first edition of Backup for Google Cloud Platform.
With these cloud-based products, traditionally the first version is a standalone product in the marketplace with light integration, Allan said. Version 2 has a deep integration and the third version takes advantage of cloud-native capabilities.
Version 4 of Veeam Backup for AWS will feature data protection for Amazon Elastic File System. Version 3 of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure adds support for Azure SQL.
In addition, Veeam will add data protection for Red Hat Virtualization, its fourth supported hypervisor. The support, targeted for the summer, will feature agentless, image-level backup and recovery of RHV virtual machines. Users can manage RHV backups in Veeam backup repositories.
Veeam also supports Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and Nutanix AHV.
Danny Allan
