At the Microsoft TechEd conference this week, Veeam Software announced it is throwing its support behind the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor platform with its Veeam Backup & Replication software.
Veeam claims more than 20,000 organizations currently use its Backup & Replication product to protect more than 1.5 million virtual machines. The software, which was introduced in February 2008, previously only supported VMware ESX, far and away the market-leading hypervisor platform.
[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Find out about VMware's latest free fling plug-in called PXE Manager for vCenter. | Read about how Microsoft Hyper-V now supports Linux-based CentOS. | Keep up-to-date on virtualization by signing up for InfoWorld's Virtualization newsletter. ]
"As Hyper-V grows and matures, organizations will increasingly find themselves managing environments that contain multiple hypervisors," said Doug Hazelman, senior director of product strategy at Veeam. "We will be able to provide a single console for backup and replication in these heterogeneous virtual environments."
Veeam says its Backup & Replication software provides cost-effective, easy-to-use, and comprehensive image-based data protection designed specifically for virtualization environments. By extending support to Microsoft, Veeam is providing Hyper-V with:
- 2-in-1 backup and replication: Veeam's solution includes replication, which provides near-continuous data protection (near-CDP) and enables the best possible recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs).
- Changed block tracking: Veeam's new hypervisor support includes technology for changed block tracking to enable fast, frequent, and efficient backup and replication of all VMs, including those running on Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV).
- Built-in deduplication and compression: These capabilities minimize consumption of network bandwidth and backup storage.
This latest Veeam announcement has been a long time coming. The company first announced plans to branch out to other hypervisors, specifically Microsoft Hyper-V, back in August 2009. The plan back then was to position Veeam solutions as a set of heterogeneous hypervisor management tools. The first product was meant to be Backup & Replication, with an anticipated release date of last quarter 2009 or first quarter 2010. So why the delay? Why make this announcement now? And why bring a backup and recovery solution to Hyper-V when it is still mainly being used for development and testing or production low-hanging fruit?
"Hyper-V is pretty clearly the second most popular hypervisor on the market, and since it's a free product its market share is likely to continue growing," said Hazelman. "It's the one our customers ask us about most frequently."