Veeam’s Availability Platform for the Hybrid Cloud Provides Continuity, Workload Mobility, and Visibility for the Always-On Enterprise™

TL; DR: Transitions in technology and the ways companies conduct business in the modern world have created an environment where high availability is expected. Downtime of just minutes can create significant interruptions in revenue flow in the contemporary 24/7 marketplace. Veeam is in the business of keeping companies consistently running by providing a comprehensive Availability Suite. Complete with backup, replication, disaster recovery, and monitoring tools, Veeam’s solutions are quickly replacing outdated legacy backup software. In fact, 69% of the world’s Fortune 500 companies have made the switch from their older backup tools to Veeam’s proven platform. Veeam connects a network of 14,000 cloud service providers to their more than 230,000 on-premises customers to help expand their presence in the marketplace and attract a larger client base. With new leadership invigorating the company, Veeam shows no signs of slowing their charge to lead the market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™.

It’s the goal of any host to provide high availability for their clients. Businesses of all sizes expect zero downtime so their online touchpoints are visible to customers around the clock. Hosting company any.cloud invested considerable resources in developing an infrastructure to keep their clients’ sites continuously up and running. However, the agent-based backup tool any.cloud was employing proved to obstruct the value proposition they were pitching to enterprise-level clients.

What any.cloud needed was a guarantee of a short and competitive recovery time and point objective (RTPO) to manage backup and disaster recovery. Previously unable to offer even a 24-hour RTPO, any.cloud partnered with Veeam for an availability solution to knock that time down to just minutes.

“It was obvious we needed a solution that delivered true availability,” said Benjamin Elveng, Chief Technical Officer at any.cloud. “Veeam Cloud Connect was a door opener for us because Veeam customers who manage their own VMs can choose us for backup and disaster recovery. We believe Veeam customers choose us over other providers because they see ‘instant activation’ next to our name in the service provider directory Veeam provides online.”

The story of any.cloud is not unique within the network of 14,000 cloud service providers employing Veeam’s solutions for the more than 230,000 customers who run or manage the environments of small, medium, and enterprise-level businesses. Veeam’s platform provides backup and replication in a full availability suite to maximize uptime so businesses don’t experience interruptions in visibility and revenue flow.

Paul Mattes, VP of Veeam’s Global Cloud Group, joined the company after 14 years at Microsoft, one of Veeam’s large enterprise partners. Like any.cloud, Paul experienced firsthand Veeam’s commitment to their customers, and that’s what attracted him to the company.

“I had a team of folks specializing in all things infrastructure, and Veeam was a wonderful partner,” Paul said. “Microsoft works with thousands of different companies, but Veeam really differentiated themselves in the way they are so partner-centric. Going back to the quality of the solution, there were never any challenges we ran into.”

Few people know more about the importance of availability than Doug Hazelman, Veeam’s VP of Product Strategy. He’s been with Veeam almost since day one and has witnessed the shift in businesses’ need to maintain constant availability in today’s marketplace. Where customer touchpoints are concerned, downtime costs big money.

“The idea of availability has become paramount,” Doug said. “It’s no longer about backing up a system and being able to restore it within 12 hours. That doesn’t work in today’s world. It has to be available as soon as possible.”

Over their 10-year existence, Veeam has grown from a few million dollars in annual earnings to more than $600 million in returns last year. This growth is the direct result of what Doug described as the increase in knowledge among businesses of all sizes, but especially enterprise-level companies, of the need to find solutions more effective than outdated legacy backup software.

“The underlying technology of where data applications live has evolved so quickly,” Doug said. “Being able to take workloads and have copies of them running in another location to fail over to instantly should be top priority.”

Doug noted financial institutions and banks have been doing this for years at a cost of millions of dollars. Contemporary virtualization technology, however, has removed this prohibitive cost point and made it very easy to replicate entire workloads to another datacenter.

“Whether it’s your own or a datacenter in the cloud, we can have businesses back up and running in a moment’s notice without a hitch,” Doud said.

Veeam’s flagship product comes in the form of their comprehensive Availability Suite. The platform is a complete solution housing backup, restoration, and replication tools.

“Obviously you need to backup your data and be able to perform granular restores of items,” Doug said. “But you also need to replicate workloads between sites, so in the event of a disaster you can fail over.”

Doug calls this a two-for-one solution for backup and replication. The suite also contains a monitoring component that works to identify potential disasters before they can create downtime. Veeam clients automatically receive all of these components in the same interface, which makes it easy to maintain high availability.

Backup & Replication Tools Quickly Recover Data & Keep Business Running

Veeam’s Backup & Replication component of the Availability Suite makes it possible to restore files, application items, and entire VMs with recovery time objectives (RTOs) of less than 15 minutes. When it comes to achieving low recovery point objectives (RPOs), the two-for-one software works to streamline and speed disaster recovery to avoid data loss.

Veeam also provides a verification tool to ensure the recoverability of all backups. Users can test restore points to verify VM replicas are recoverable.

One of the biggest responses Veeam has received from users relates to the platform’s ease of use. Businesses can quickly get up and running and stay that way with Veeam’s backup and replication software.

“Our solution isn’t massively complicated,” Doug said. “We can protect the smallest or largest infrastructures, and it’s still all easy to use, set up, and get going, where other solutions might take months of consulting just to get things up and running in one particular datacenter.”

Real-Time Monitoring Features Create Visibility to Avoid Downtime

Another important feature in Veeam’s Availability Suite is the capability to monitor the overall performance of infrastructure to detect issues and plan for and prevent disasters.

“Disasters happen that we have no control over,” Doug said, “but we have different ways to keep an eye on the environment to make sure everything’s healthy.”

Though Veeam’s main focus is on making sure customers are able to quickly restore availability after a disaster, their Veeam ONE solution makes it possible for businesses to track issues arising in their backup environments. This feature works to prepare VMware infrastructure for backup and restoration in the event of a disaster.

Like the other components of Veeam’s suite, Veeam ONE operates with the overarching goal of creating high availability for businesses. In this case, the troubleshooting feature works to identify issues prior to a downtime event that can impact revenue.

Veeam’s business grew by an impressive 28% in 2016, and Doug told us the cloud side of the company is moving at the fastest clip. Veeam works with more than 14,000 cloud service providers worldwide and acts as an effective partner to connect them with a network of more than 230,000 on-premises customers via their Cloud Connect solution.

“We see the need for ourselves and customers to enable a hybrid cloud approach that looks at a mix of on-prem and cloud solutions,” Doug said. “We enable that for the smallest of businesses all the way up to the largest of enterprises.”

Service providers in the network offer cloud and colocation services and use Cloud Connect to allow Veeam’s on-prem customers to find them. This global program has proven very successful for all parties.

Joining the Veeam Cloud and Service Provider Partner Program (VCSP) grants access to customers specifically looking for backup and replication services to maintain high availability. These partnerships create opportunities for service providers to expand their footprint and customer base in the marketplace.

Hosting company any.cloud realized the larger businesses they were trying to attract were looking for solutions that guaranteed high availability. For them, partnering with Veeam was a no-brainer after discovering the value the company’s Availability Suite and Cloud Connect program offered.

Veeam plans to continue to provide and scale the types of solutions any.cloud employed and lead the way in building products to replace the outdated backup software still being used by some enterprises.

“We weren’t first to market in terms of virtualization, disaster recovery, and data protection, but we ended up being best,” Doug said. “When we look at 2017, our goal is to go out and replace the legacy software still running for enterprise-level companies. We look at it as a multibillion-dollar market with large opportunities for growth.”

In fact, in just the last 12 months, more than 50,000 companies have jettisoned their legacy backup software for Veeam’s availability solutions. Numbers like those definitely bode well for Doug’s 2017 forecast.

Doug noted one of the biggest victories of the past year was the addition of Peter McKay as President and COO.

“Peter brings a lot of experience in taking companies like Veeam from where we’re at now to growing us to the next level,” Doug said. “He’s brought in a great, experienced team of people to help us do just that.”

With new leadership invigorating the company, an expansion of their network of service providers and on-premises customers, and the onboarding of new enterprise-level clients, it’s certain Veeam will continue to pioneer the market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™.