In this Episode I’m with Mike Resseler, Microsoft EMEA Evangelist at Veeam, and we talk about:
– Veeam Availability suite V9
– Features for service providers
– Evolution of Veeam Endpoint Backup Free
Here the full transcript of the show
Enrico: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Juku.beats. Today, I’m here with Mike Resseler, EMEA Evangelist for Veeam. Hi, Mike. How are you?
Mike: Hi, Enrico. I’m fine. How are you?
Enrico: I’m very good. I’m very glad that … This is the first episode after amount of stop due to vacation and VMworld, all that stuff. I’m very glad that you are here also because you are a sponsor of the next TECH unplugged that we will have in Amsterdam at the end of this month, a good opportunity to know better Veeam and its technology.
Mike: Sure. Yes, we are looking very much forward to that event. My colleague, Luca, will be there. We’ll have some people from product management there. We’re really looking forward to that and listening to all of the … I’m pretty sure very good sessions we’re going to see over there.
Enrico: Great. You know how this podcast works, so we have three questions and you have just five minutes, so very short and we’re trying to have it very short. Okay. First of all, I have to say that I’m quite impressed by Veeam. The company can’t be considered as startup any longer, almost 2,000 employees, more than 150,000 customers and mature product but it is still growing like crazy. New version of the products come up relentlessly. Now you have this version 9. What are the major differences between 8 and 9?
Mike: Well, as always, we try to deliver a few more or, let’s say, a lot more functionality in the product. We already started to announce to the world a couple of these bigger announcements, one of them being that now besides NetApp and HP, we’re going to integrate with EMC’s Snapshots as well. There are quite a few other ones as well. We are improving the entire primary storage integration. One of the things that has been requested a lot like direct NFS access, we’re going to deliver. We already had storage Snapshots that we could leverage for our Explorers but now we actually are going to give the possibility to build our very known trademarked technology, On-Demand Sandbox on those Snapshots. That means that your investment into your storage will become even … The return will become even bigger.
We’ve got a lot of improvements to our Explorers, for SharePoint, Active Directory, Exchange and so on. We’re also announcing a brand new one, and again, this is very much anticipated. We got a lot of good feedback already. We’re going to announce now the Veeam Explorer for Oracle. Then we also announced that we’re going to make the product even more enterprise-ready than it is already today by having a stand-alone console, by enhancing a lot so that offices with branch offices or remote offices, the ROBO environments that they have a lot of enhancements to the last one and so on, improving our tape support, all of this kind of things including, which I think most people that know Veeam is whenever we bring out a new release, we announce a couple of new big named features or functionality, but we’re also working always a lot under the hood and improving that as well. In a nutshell, these are the major differences that we’re going to have. There are a few other ones we’re going to announce in the next couple of weeks, but I’m still going to keep those a secret, not to spoil these announcements.
Enrico: I love those stuff and … But I’m also really interested in a feature … In a set of feature that you are developing for service provider, so throughout the [dam 00:04:10] building, backup and disaster recovery service. Version 9 is a great improvement in these capabilities. Can you give us an idea of what it does and how it works?
Mike: Yes, sure. In version 8, we had our first version of Cloud Connect, which allows service providers to have backups of their customers that were taken on premises, so this was kind of our first step into disaster recovery as a service and it proved to be a big stuff and a successful stuff. We have lots of service providers already worldwide that are leveraging that technology and offering that additional capabilities and service to their customer. Of course, that was just the first step and now in v9, we’re going bring Veeam Cloud Connect Replication, which means that from now on, it will be possible from the customer on-premises infrastructure to actually replicate their [virt 00:05:10] machines to a service provider infrastructure. We believe this is something that a lot of service providers were waiting for because just like in v8 with Cloud Connect for backups, we made it as easy as possible over SSL.
There are, of course, a little bit more components necessary because we’re talking replication. You’ve got networking. You got failover/failback, that kind of stuff, but we really try to keep it, again, as easy as possible for them so that they can offer these services at a decent price point for the customer, giving disaster recovery as a service for their customers and to make sure that customers have that disaster recovery capabilities as well without themselves needing to invest a lot in off-site locations or that kind of things.
We’re looking very much forward to this new version. We know our service providers are looking very much forward. We’ve got a lot of end users as well asking for it. Yeah, soon, in the not-so-far future, this will be released and we’re looking forward to it. We’re absolutely certain that our service providers that want to work with us are going to use this and offer that additional functionality more as a [lace 00:06:31], more capabilities to the customers than those large major clouds can offer today. We’re very excited about this new functionality, and I’m certainly also excited to see what is going to bring the future after this one and what more we can do in that space.
Enrico: There is one more thing that really interesting me in your product lineup, which is the free Endpoint Backup, a product that I have to say I use and I love. What can we expect in the future for this product? More integration with the rest of the products or something that will help us to back up and I mean [inaudible 00:07:20] end users back up to the cloud, I don’t know. What can we expect?
Mike: We just released version 1.1, which addresses Windows 10. Actually, in that version, there’s something else and that announcement officially will be made very soon, is that we are integrating with LabTech. LabTech, which is a RMM provider. Those will be the first ones that can actually offer this to their customers, being able to remotely deploy to manage it, to even do remote disaster recovery or better said, remote bare-metal recovery of physical endpoints. That is the first step we’re going to, and we are going to gather that feedback, see what people want more, what is missing. Then we’re going to decide where we’re going to bring the product further on.
That being said, there is always going to be a free version of Veeam Endpoint Backup as far as we can see it now. We already started thinking and planning version 2, and that’s going to be rather easy. Well, maybe not that easy because we’re going to have to make some choices. Thanks to all of the great feedback we’re getting from all of our users in the forums and we love that feedback. Keep it coming, but there is so much feedback that we really have to look very carefully what is most important for the people.
For anything else, today, let’s say it’s a little bit cloudy where we’re going to with Endpoint at this moment. Just the LabTech, we know, will be announced soon. We are waiting more feedback, always a free version. That’s certain as well. Then we’re going to see what the market wants, what drives and so on. There’s not really a road map defined at that moment and still everything is possible for a Veeam Endpoint Backup at this point in time.
Enrico: Okay. You also said a lot of stuff, so before closing this episode, I would like to know where we can find you on the Internet or on Twitter.
Mike: On Twitter, you can find through @Veeam of course, which of course I manage together with my colleagues, [Rick Ankland 00:09:50] and Luca. My personal one is @MikeResseler. Many people will write it as Reseller, so … That’s the other way around. It’s two S’s, one L. That’s one way to find me or simply by e-mailing me, by using my first name @veeam.com. That’s also a possibility to find me, of course.
Enrico: That’s great. Thank you very much for your time.
Mike: My pleasure.
Enrico: Bye-bye.
Mike: Goodbye.
