Veeam, the Switzerland-based data management and resilience specialist, has released Veeam Availability Suite V10 – the closely watched new iteration of the company’s flagship backup offering, with a claimed 150 “major enhancements”.

With Veeam (recently bought by US-based private equity giant Insight Partners for $5 billion) used by 365,000+ customers worldwide, including 66 percent of the Global 2,000, the software release is one of the year’s high-profile thus-far.

As the company’s CTO Danny Allan put it in the company’s release notes today: “v10 is the biggest release in the history of Veeam… creating the simplest, most flexible, and most reliable solution for hybrid-cloud environments.”

Most companies will say their releases were “eagerly anticipated”. From what Computer Business Review hears, this one actually was. We took a closer look.

Veeam Availability Suite V10: What’s New

The release adds a sprawling range of new capabilities [pdf] for Linux, HPE Primera and HPE StoreOnce, Nutanix AHV, PostgreSQL, MySQL and more.

Back-Up “Instantly” to VMware VMs… 

Among those likely to be welcomed by enterprise users is the new ability to save “instantly” any Veeam backup created by any of the firm’s products to a VMware vSphere VM in a move that the company described as ” finally making hybrid cloud DR a reality through meeting the RTO for any data or application regardless of its location.”

New APIs to Mine Back-Up Data

For those keen to mine back-up data, the company has rolled out a new Veeam data integration API that lets approved third-party applications and scripts access backups for data mining, security analysis, compliance checks, and other data reuse.

Better Encryption 

Veeam has also swapped the encryption used in communication between backup infrastructure components and agent management functionality from SHA-1 to SHA-256 to “align with industry security best practices”. (Critics might wonder what took it so long; SHA-1 has been “broken” since 2017, being generous…)

Network Attached Storage 

Also new is the company’s ability to offer Network Attached Storage (NAS) data protection and recovery to back up unstructured data at scale irrespective of architecture. Veeam describes this as built on a “proprietary distributed file system,  designed and built from the ground up for protection of PBs of unstructured data.

“[This] can be scaled seamlessly…on commodity server hardware”.

Immutable Backups Based on S3 Object Lock

With an eye on protecting users from ransomware attacks, the company has also rolled out an immutable backups feature (an optional extension of its new Capacity Tier data management policy) to protect recent backups from modification and deletions by using advanced object storage functionality called S3 Object Lock.

“You can create immutable backup copies on Amazon S3, as well as any S3-compatible service provider or on-premises object storage solution which implements S3 Object Lock API. Uniquely, by leveraging object-level locking, we were able to preserve the forever-incremental object storage offload engine, thus avoiding periodic full backups requirement imposed by bucket-level retention lock,” Veeam notes.

Happy Partners. 

The company rolled out a range of partners including HPE, Cloudian and VMware to boost the release. (Veeam’s global ecosystem includes 70,000+ partners, including HPE, NetApp, Cisco and Lenovo as exclusive resellers).

“HPE is redefining storage for our customers and we need partners who understand the journey toward digital transformation depends on data and intelligence,” said Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)’s Jim Jackson in a canned statement.

He added “We are thrilled that Veeam now supports HPE Primera and offers enhancements for HPE StoreOnce so customers’ data is always available.”

Veeam Availability Suite V10 , designed for medium and large-sized enterprise users, is priced in the UK at £1,305 per year for 10 licenses. The less comprehensive “Veeam backup starter” for SMEs is priced from £348/year for 10 licenses.

Note…

There is no shortage of known issues that users might want to take a close look at before upgrading. These can be found here [pdf]. Excited about something major that we have missed, or encountering a huge bug? Get in touch.