VEEAM ON 2021 — Veeam Backup for Office 365 will support native archiving to cold storage services in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The archiving, and a new self-service recovery option, will arrive this summer in version six (v6) of Veeam’s Backup for Office 365.

The new Office 365 storage capabilities are among several revelations by the company on Tuesday at its annual VeeamON event. Veeam also plans to deliver support for Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) backup, and is integrating its Kasten K10 for Kubernetes.

SaaS-based backup for Office 365, which Veeam launched three years ago, is the company’s fastest growing offering. CTO Danny Allan said the company now has 6 million Veeam Backup for Office 365 paid subscriptions, among 175,000 organizations. Earlier this month, the company reported that subscriptions grew 156% in the first quarter of 2021 year-over-year.

Veeam Backup for Office 365 protects Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams data.

Veeam’s Danny Allan

“It’s been a massive driver for us of growth,” Allan said during a media and analyst briefing on Tuesday.

Last quarter, he said Veeam moved 100 petabytes of Office 365 data to the cloud.

The v6 release of Veeam Backup for Office 365 will allow tiering of data, based on data retention policies. Customers can tier between more costly AWS S3 and the less expensive Amazon Glacier cold storage. Likewise, they can tier with Azure Blob storage and Azure Archive.

“You can move it from Azure Blob to Azure archive and it’s a 20x price reduction,” Allan said.

The self-service support coming in v6 will let users recover emails or SharePoint files without putting in a helpdesk ticket. Organizations can set permissions governing the use of the self-service option, Allan added.

Shift to Hybrid Cloud Backups

Besides providing native Office 365 archiving to the three largest clouds, Veeam will enable backup to object services including Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) and Azure SQL.

Allan said hybrid cloud backup is a key focus at this year’s VeeamON. Since introducing the capability of moving on-premises backups to the cloud in 2019, it has quickly taken off, he said. Customers moved 44 petabytes into AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in 2019. Last year, he said it grew 500%, to 242 petabytes.

Veeam’s ability to offer multitenancy has been a key factor in growing the company’s ecosystem of cloud service providers.

“We have tens of thousands of cloud service providers around the world,” Allan said. “They’re offering these solutions in a multitenant environment, with multitenancy of billing and chargeback. What it enables them to do is add on their specific expertise. And for data sovereignty purposes, or local regulatory purposes, there’s a lot of expertise that is needed to deliver these types of services.”

Red Hat Virtualization Support

Veeam Backup and Replication will support Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) this summer. RHV, a variant of the open source KVM virtual machine, is the fourth hypervisor Veeam has supported. When Veeam was founded 15 years ago, it only supported VMware’s vSphere. A decade ago, Veeam added its second hypervisor, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, which is built into Windows Server. In 2017, Veeam added support for Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), which is also a forked version of KVM.

Red Hat and Veeam co-engineered a feature added to the RHV kernel that enables change block tracking (CBT).

“It’s one of the ways that we can do backup and recovery so quickly,” Allan said.

Kasten K10 for Kubernetes Integration with Veeam

At last year’s VeeamON conference, Veeam announced a partnership with Kasten, which provides a Kubernetes backup service. A few months later, Veeam acquired Kasten for $150 million. Allan said the company has integrated Kasten K10 with the Veeam repository to provide centralized storage of Kubernetes backups.

“If you take a backup with Kasten K10, you can send that data into the Veeam repository,” he said. “And of course, then you get all the benefits of the core Veeam platform. Things like instant recovery and moving data around and tiering it and all of the things that we have built over the last decade.”

It can write to disk, SSD, object storage cloud and tape. Support for the integrated repository is set for release later this year.