Last week Veeam announced that version 9 of Backup & Replication will feature a new addition to it’s Cloud Connect product…Replication for Service Providers. The version 8 functionality will be extended to include advanced image-based VM replication.

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The extended functionality will give service providers the ability to provide clients with RaaS (recovery-as-a-service) in the form of Veeam Cloud Connect Replication for Service Providers. This builds on Veeam Cloud Connect which made it easy for existing and new Veeam customers to extend their backup infrastructure to cloud based repositories for offsite backups. I worked closely with Veeam last year in productizing Cloud Connect for Veeam and adding it to the Zettagrid Product Catalog and will be looking forward to seeing how the replication feature will add to the service offering.

Included with Veeam 9, clients will get a fully integrated, secure and efficient way to send VM replicas to Cloud based repositories which will enable the protection of applications and services with dramatically improved recovery time objectives.

Cutting through the marketing of the press release the key features are listed below:

  • Built-in multi-tenant support to securely share host or cluster CPU, RAM, storage and networking resource allocation between different tenants;
  • Full site failover to a service provider site with just a few clicks on a secure web portal, including failover orchestration with failover plans, and partial failover to instantly switch over selected VMs only;
  • Built-in network extension appliances to preserve communication with and between production VMs regardless of their location;
  • Failback to the existing or new infrastructure to restore normal business operations;
  • Failover testing for seamless failover simulation without disrupting production workloads;
  • Single port connectivity via a secure, reliable SSL connection to a service provider; and
  • Multiple traffic reduction technologies including built-in WAN acceleration, replica seeding, and replication from a backup.

“Veeam Cloud Connect not only enables our users to fulfill the offsite requirement without having to invest in offsite infrastructure or management, but also presents new opportunities for service providers to build recurring revenue from their existing customer base, expand their presence in the DRaaS market, and establish relationships with new customers” – Ratmir Timashev, CEO of Veeam

This is an interesting (but expected) move by Veeam who are competing with the likes of VMware vCenter Replication and DRaaS leaders Zerto…who have a strong offering based on vCloud Director that also can be used by Hyper-V houses to replicate (hypervisor agnostic) in almost real time from on-premises to a Service Provider Cloud. There has been a lot of debate on inline replication vs snapshot based replication solutions and this move is sure to fuel that debate even more.

Hopefully I can get my hands on the beta shortly and start to pull apart the replication mechanisms. Upon first glance there doesn’t seem to be any vCloud Director integration which be somewhat surprising given the Service Providers out there who are strong vCD + Veeam partners. Would be a shame to not carry forward Veeam’s history of vCloud Director integration.

Looking forward to seeing what Veeam have brought to the table with V9!

Further Reading:

http://www.veeam.com/blog/the-new-veeam-cloud-connect-now-with-replication-services.html