Veeam previewed Kasten K10 V 6.0, a significant update to its cloud-native Kubernetes data protection offering. The new release, demonstrated at the annual VeeamON 2023 conference in Miami this week, is set for release later next month.

The release of Kasten K10 V 6.0 provides deeper integration with the Veeam Data Platform and promises to offer “enterprise-grade” protection from ransomware attacks. It supports the latest Kubernetes version 1.26, which has a new container registry, and provides VMware vSphere migration supports Container Storage Interface (CSI) migration.

Kasten K10 V 6.0 also supports Red Hat OpenShift 4.12, which provides an updated and more secure version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and support for vSphere in different zones and regions. It will also provide enhanced threat detection, observability, new “intelligent” policy management and the ability to recover rapidly from a ransomware incident.

At VeeamON, the company’s leaders demonstrated how the new release enables real-time recovery by providing immutable backups. The 16-year-old company, which made a name for itself protecting VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines, said it recently surpassed Dell Technologies as the market share leading data protection software provider, citing IDC’s latest report on the data replication and protection software market.

Accelerating Kubernetes Protection

Less known, company officials lament, is that Veeam has gained a strong foothold in protecting cloud-native Kubernetes applications. Seeking to add protection of Kubernetes-based cloud-native data to its portfolio, Veeam acquired Kasten in 2020 for $150 million.

During the opening VeeamON keynote session, Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran (shown above, onstage during his keynote) claimed that Veeam now protects 30% of Kubernetes-based data today. “Veeam is the global leader in Kubernetes protection,” Eswaran told attendees. “Every company is just getting started [in its] DevOps strategy, and I think it’s getting to that inflection point where you actually [should] take a step back and see what your DevOps protection strategy needs to look like.”

Kasten issues new releases of K10 twice a month with iterative updates. Still, V 6.0 is a new feature release, which offers tighter integration with the Veeam Data Platform v12, released earlier this year. The new Kasten K10 V 6.0 release also provides extended threat detection using enhanced logging of all events natively into Kubernetes Audit.

Enhanced Kubernetes Security

Veeam has also set a path for Kubernetes Audit to integrate with intelligent threat detection solutions to discover and report anomalous or suspicious activity patterns. For example, it can interface with AWS Secrets Manager to store and retrieve passcodes. Further, the new Kasten K10 release enables integration of Kubernetes native policies into infrastructure as code or serverless computing architectures.

Veeam CTO Danny Allen demonstrated the new security release.

Danny Allan, Veeam’s CTO and senior vice president for product strategy, led demonstrations of the new release during the VeeamON opening keynote session. Allan emphasized the Kasten K10 version 6.0’s new fingerprinting capability, which he said is noteworthy because of the complexity of applications in Kubernetes environments.

“You can have structured data, unstructured data, message queues, object storage; they’re very complex in fingerprinting,” Allan said. “Understanding where the persistent data is going and how that is architected is a key part of that.”

The new release also provides enhanced hybrid cloud support on Google Cloud Anthos, cross-platform restore targets in VMware Tanzu and Cisco Hybrid Cloud CVD. It also supports new storage targets, including NetApp ONTAP S3-compatible storage and Dell-EMC ECS Enterprise Object Storage, also an S3 compatible store.