24/7 data centre availability now 'a reality' for all applications and workloads

“The modern business cycle is no longer confined to five days a week, eight hours a day,” said Ratmir Timashev, CEO of Veeam. “IT organizations must make applications and data available to all stakeholders every minute of every day. This is the era of the Always-On Business. Veeam Availability Suite provides a new enabling technology that transforms the Always-On Business from a mere dream for most organizations into a reality.”

Achieving non-stop availability of applications and data has traditionally required a significant investment in fully redundant systems with instant failover ensuring recovery within seconds. These kinds of massive investments could only be justified for a few applications, so the vast majority of applications are served with legacy backup solutions that offer recovery time and point objectives (RTPO™) of several hours or days, failing to meet the needs of the Always-On Business. For the first time, this significant availability gap can be bridged thanks to Veeam’s new category of solution, Availability for the Modern Data Center™, which provides an RTPO of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data.

Veeam Availability Suite bridges this availability gap by providing five key enabling capabilities (all statistics below are derived from ESG’s “Veeam Customer Insights Survey,”):

High-Speed Recovery: Rapid recovery of what IT wants, the way IT wants it. Ninety-six percent of Veeam recoveries are within recovery time objective (RTO) service level agreements (SLAs), compared to 78 percent for other solutions.
Data Loss Avoidance: Near-continuous data protection and streamlined disaster recovery. Eighty-three percent of Veeam customers are more confident in their backup than they were with previous backup systems.
Verified Protection: Guaranteed recovery of every file, application or virtual server, every time. Seventy-one percent of Veeam customers report improved reliability of backups compared to other solutions.
Risk Mitigation: Low-risk deployment of new applications with a production-like test environment within Veeam Virtual Lab, leveraging the investment made in backup and replication systems and data. Sixty-six percent of users of Veeam’s monitoring, reporting, and capacity planning features find them better or much better than other solutions.
Complete Visibility: Proactive monitoring and alerting of issues before they affect operations. Seventy-one percent of customers using Veeam monitoring and reporting tools say their risk awareness has improved compared to other solutions.

“Veeam gives us comfort and security we never had with other tools,” said John Ferguson, Network System Specialist at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, one of the world’s largest cancer care, research and education organizations. “Veeam has our back every time. It’s a rock-solid solution that’s crucial, especially when you’re trying to restore something during an audit or for a critical business need.”

“Veeam’s Instant VM Recovery™ is amazing,” said James Richards, Virtualisation and Server Specialist at Flybe, Europe’s largest regional airline. “When there was a problem with a VM that runs an important aircraft maintenance application, I kicked off Instant VM Recovery and users could access the application in minutes. When I transferred the VM from the Veeam NFS storage to our SAN storage with the application still running, users never even knew.”

Leveraging the modern virtualization, storage and cloud technologies, and now integrating deeply with the leading storage solutions from providers like EMC, HP and NetApp, Veeam Availability Suite provides critical enabling technology for the Modern Data Center.

New features in the upcoming Veeam Availability Suite v8 include:

NetApp Integration: Veeam’s Backup from NetApp SnapShot® enables IT to create backups from NetApp SnapShot every 15 minutes or less with no impact on the production environment. Patent-pending technology allows backups to be completed 20 times faster than with competing products. Veeam Explorer™ for Storage Snapshots provides free VM, guest file and application-item recovery from NetApp SnapShot, SnapMirror® and SnapVault®.
EMC Data Domain Boost™ Integration: Dramatically reduces backup window by allowing over 10 times faster backup file transformation and up to 50 percent faster full backups requiring up to 99 percent less network bandwidth. Support for Fibre Channel connectivity enables LAN free backup to Data Domain.
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL: Lets users quickly restore individual databases back to the original or a new location, including point-in-time recovery through transaction log backup and replay, enabling precise restore of databases to a specific moment in time, or even to specific transactions.
Replication Enhancements: The new version adds Built-in WAN Acceleration with replication jobs, and enables users to perform replication from backup files, as opposed to the virtual infrastructure. In addition, IT administrators can leverage the new failover plans, and perform planned failovers to facilitate data center migrations with no data loss, further improving RTPO.