Veeam Backup & Replication Update Gains CDP Capability

The newest version of Veeam Backup & Replication—v11—announced at the Veeam Live virtual conference this week, has hundreds of new features, but a few really stand out.

Some of the most highly anticipated features of the Veeam Backup & Replication update include Continuous Data Protection (CDP), expanded instant recovery capabilities for enterprise apps and file shares.

Its CDP capability is designed to reduce downtime and minimize data loss for Tier 1 VMware workloads. Veeam CDP uses the vSphere API for IO filtering, which provides continuous replication between a source and target VMware environment. The goal is to enable organizations to reduce their recovery point objectives (RPOs) to seconds and choose any point in time for recovery. CDP is a feature extension of Veeam Backup & Recovery, which means that users don’t have to buy, deploy or manage an additional piece of stand-alone software.

The Veeam Backup & Replication update also features expanded instant recovery for both NAS file shares and databases like Microsoft SQL and Oracle. It essentially builds on the previous version’s ability to back up NAS systems and is an effective way to enhance business continuity, explained Krista Macomber, a senior analyst at Evaluator Group. “Instant VM recovery is something Veeam is known for, so it’s notable that it is bringing this capability to additional resources that are critical to enterprises.”

In addition, Version 11 of Veeam Backup & Replication features a hardened Linux repository. While Veeam has long supported immutability with the secondary backup copy with multiple options (tape, backup to a Veeam cloud service provider, copying to an S3 compatible object storage), the Veeam hardened repository feature enables the initial primary backup copy to be immutable. While Veeam users were able to do this in the past with specially configured hardware or appliances, V11 provides a simple checkbox to use any Linux repository, said Danny Allan, CTO of Veeam.

Veeam Backup & Replication also now includes AWS Glacier, Azure Archive and Google Cloud storage, which opens up the ability to use the cloud for data archiving and long-term retention.

Other notable new features in the Veeam Backup & Replication update include a Veeam agent for Mac, and Veeam-enabled backup as a service (BaaS) and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

When taken together, the new features that make up Version 11 bring together more data protection capabilities like storage snapshots, backup, replication and CDP into one platform.

“There is a trend in the data protection software space toward converging backup, operational recovery, disaster recovery—read: lower RPOs and RTPs [recovery time objectives]—and data archive capabilities. This is to reduce costs and operational complexities for customers while allowing data protection teams to meet the varying levels of protection service levels required by today's ecosystem of apps and infrastructures,” Macomber said. “For Veeam, adding CDP in V11 is its major step forward in this regard because it allows it to address RPOs in the seconds for the workloads that are its core wheelhouse—critical VMs.”