VeeamON 2017 has come and gone and even though I left New Orleans on Friday afternoon, I just arrived back home…54 hours of travel, transit and delays has meant that my VeeamOFF continued longer than most! What an amazing week it was though for Veeam, our partners and our customers…The announcements that we made over the course of the event have been extremely well received and it’s clear to me that the Availability Platform vision that we first talked about last year is in full execution mode.

The TPM team executed brilliantly and along with the core team and the other 300 Veeam employee’s that where in New Orleans it was great to see all the hard work pay off. The Technical Evangelist’s main stage live demo’s all went off (if not for some dodgy HDMI) without a hitch and we all felt privileged to be able to demo some of the key announcements. On a personal note, It was a career highlight to be able to present to approximately 2000 people and be part of a brand new product launch for Veeam with Veeam PN.

From a networking point of view it was great to meet so many new people and put faces to Twitter handles. It was also great to see the strong Veeam Vanguard representation at the event and even though I couldn’t party with the group like previous years, it looked like they got a lot out of week, both from a Veeam technical point of view and without doubt on the social front…I was living vicariously through them as they where partying hard in New Orleans.

VeeamON Key Announcements:

Availability Suit 10

  • Built-in Management for Veeam Agent for Linux and Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows
  • Scale-Out Backup Repository — Archive Tier
  • NAS Backup Support for SMB and NFS Shares
  • Veeam CDP (Continuous Data Protection)
  • Primary Storage Integrations — Universal Storage Integration API
  • DRaaS Enhancements (for service providers)
  • Additional enterprise scalability enhancements

For me, the above list shows our ongoing commitment to the Enterprise but more importantly for me working on enhancing our platform so that our Veeam Cloud and Service Providers can continue to leverage our technology to create and offer cloud based Disaster Recovery and Backup services.

Product Announcements and Releases:

I have been lucky enough to work as the TPM lead on Veeam PN and I was extremely excited to be able to demo it for the first time to the world. I’ve written a blog post here that goes into some more detail around Veeam PN and if you want to view the main stage demo I’ve linked to the video in the last section…I start the demo at the 29th minute mark if you want to skip through.

vCloud Director Cloud Connect Enhancements:

As mentioned above we have enhanced core capabilities in v10 when it comes to Cloud Connect Replication and Cloud Connect Backup. Obviously, the announcement that we will be supporting vCloud Director is significant and one that a lot of our Cloud and Service Providers are extremely happy with. It just makes the DRaaS experience that much more complete and when you add that to the CDP features in the core platform which will allow for sub minute RPO’s for replica’s it firmly places Cloud Connect as the market leader in Replication as a Service technologies.

We also announced backup to tape features for Cloud Connect Backup which will allow Cloud and Service Providers to offload long term backup files to cheaper storage. Note that this isn’t limited to tape if used in conjunction with a Virtual Tape Library. Hopefully our VCSP’s can create revenue generating service offerings around this feature as well.

VCSP Council Meeting:

On Thursday, our R&D leads met with a select group of our top Cloud and Service Provider partners over a three hour lunch meeting which could have gone all day if time permitted. It was great to be on the other side of the fence for the first time and hear all the great feedback, advice and suggestions from the group. It’s encouraging to hear about how Veeam Backup & Replication had become the central platform for IaaS, Cloud Replication an Backup offerings and with the v10 enhancements I expect that to be even more the case moving forward.

Main Stage Recordings:

Wednesday and Thursday morning both saw main stage general sessions where we announced our new products and features along with keynotes from Sanjay Poonen and Mark Russinovich as well as co-CEO Peter McKay and co-founder Ratmir Timashev. They are worth a look and I’ve posted links to the video recordings below. Note that they are unedited and contain all change overs and wait times.

https://www.veeam.com/veeamon/live

Press Releases: