Veeams Next Big Thing

Last week Veeam launched a countdown to the Next BIG Thing on there website, the clock is counting down to the 16th of May, there are no other details on there website regarding what this maybe so it’s probably time we all started guessing 🙂

Some of you may remember when Veeam did something similar last year in the run up to the Veeam Backup and Replication 5 release, although at the time there was always a bit more information as to what was going to be announced e.g. the name “Sure Backup”

So what would a Veeam pending announcement be without some wild guesses on my part.

Veeam Backup 5.5 / 6.0

Veeam in at least the last couple of years have gone with a yearly release cycle of its major product Veeam Backup and Replication, they normally start hinting about functionality earlier in the year, demonstrate the functionality through VMworld and similar events and release towards the end of quarter 3 beginning of quarter 4. But in the words of one of my customers, what could they possibly add to an already feature packed product. There was a number of improvements in Veeam 5 with the biggest being Surebackup, Instant Recovery and U-AIR, how could they build upon this to make it the next big thing?

Cloud backup – As we all have our heads in the cloud at the moment it would seem timely for Veeam to announce a cloud backup solution, I would believe Veeam would choose to partner with a provider rather than offer this functionality through their own datacentres. We have seen Quest with vRanger offer a similar functionality utilising Riverbed’s Whitewater service. My hope is Veeamm would be able to offer this as a service to service providers and channel partners to create their own Veeam cloud backup solution.

On a smaller scale, I would love to see improvements to the Veeam Backup and Replication Scheduling options, about 9 out of 10 of my customers run their jobs in a serial fashion with one job kicking of the next so on and so forth. This is achieved with relative ease at the moment by running post commands to kick of the next job. I would love to have a Veeam scheduling wizard where I could create a bespoke Veeam schedule to do this in a drag and drop fashion. This functionality could easily be extended to allow me to schedule my surebackup verification jobs and call third party applications such as Backup Exec to push my Veeam jobs to tape.

The ability to be able to replicate backup jobs to another location, a number of my customer have expressed the wish that they would like to be able to backup locally and then ship the backups to a DR location. Whilst we currently achieve this we SAN replication or DFS etc it would be great if Veeam B&R had the ability to be able to do this inbound.

Veeam Backup Cloud management, the ability for a channel partner to centrally manage customers backups from their own cloud, without the need to VPN or connect to a customers site.

Physical backup or at least SAN LUN backup integration, yes there are some people that aren’t 100% virtualised and it would be great to use Veeam to backup all the servers, also integration with SAN vendors to be able to backup iSCSI inside the guest connected volumes would be fantastic.

As always I would love Veeam to be able to push to tape itself without the need for me to relay on another vendors backup product, although I would never really expect this to happen as we all know tape is an ageing technology and the amount of R&D that would have to be put in to support a wealth of devices would by high I would imagine.

Veeam Monitor / Reporter

It seems an obvious step for products like these to start making the leap to the cloud, with a pay as you use type service, again the ability for Veeam’s partners to remotely monitor and manage customers virtual environments, or larger companies to manage or monitor branch office centrally from a cloud based platform.

I would love to see additional functionality in these products to support more of the stack, such as application aware monitoring for Exchange, Sharepoint, Windows, Switches and SANs maybe. I am seeing an increase in customer asking for good monitoring products but they normally want one product that can support the whole stack rather than an application for each. Veeam already does have nWorks that plugs into the Microsoft SCOM suite but SCOM isn’t for everyone.

Integration with VMware View to monitor on the health / user experience would be a fantastic addition to the monitor product.

Veeam VDI Manager

There seems to be only a few tools based around making your VDI experience better, is there even a need? Maybe there would be the need for product to help automate updating golden images, monitoring linked clones, performance, profile management etc who knows?

Microsoft

There has been a lot of discussion in the past about Hyper-V backup being made available etc, this isn’t something I would personally be very excited about but I am sure this would be big for the Microsoft community.

Conclusion

What ever Veeam have coming next I am sure it will be well thought out, well designed and something that we will be wondering how we ever lived without a few months later! Keep an eye on http://www.handsonvirtualization.com after the announcement as Doug Hazelman from Veeam will be joining us to discuss the announcement.