Veeam has announced it is extending its Backup & Replication software for virtual machines to include support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform.
Currently Veeam’s products – including data protection, disaster recovery and management software for virtualised environments – only support VMware environments. However Version 6.0 of Veeam Backup & Replication extends support to include Microsoft Hyper-V environments, the company said.
The move is a reaction to the increasing number of businesses, particularly in the SMB space, that are adoption Microsoft virtualisation technology, Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev told CBR.
"VMware owns around 90% of the virtual server market while Microsoft’s share is small but growing," Timashev told CBR. "Hyper-V is finally good enough for SMB customers and has a good balance between features and price. Larger businesses using VMware care more about the features but they are starting to put non-mission critical workloads."
The ability to migrate VMs and memory overcommitment are other features that are helping to increase the adoption of Microsoft Hyper-V, Timashev said, who added that he expects Microsoft to increase its market share over the next few years, particularly in the small business space.
"In a few years I think Microsoft will have maybe 20% – 30% of the server virtualisation market overall, going up to around 50% in the SMB space and maybe 90% in the very small business market," he said. "It’s hard to ignore Microsoft. It knows large enterprises are committed to VMware so it is concentrating on SMBs by bundling Hyper-V in with Windows Server."
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Veeam says its Backup & Replication platform offers near-continuous data protection and technology for changed block tracking to enable frequent backup and replication of all VMs, the company said.
It also includes built-in deduplication and compression, which Veeam says can minimize consumption of network bandwidth and backup storage.
Timashev told CBR that while Veeam has no definitive plans to do so it would "make sense" for the rest of its product portfolio to be extended out to Microsoft environments, particularly if the Redmond giant continues to pick up market share.
Veeam Backup and Replication version 6 is scheduled for release during the fourth quarter of 2011.
