

Operating a business in today’s demanding environment is a many-headed hydra. Organizations juggle multiple cloud computing providers while maintaining regulatory compliance, as well as attempt to secure and effectively manage data resources across multicloud infrastructures. Strategy is the secret as businesses evolve to cope with an intelligent, fast-paced, and potentially disorganized environment, according to Dave Russell (pictured), vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam Software Inc.
Russell spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed multicloud strategy and the functionality offered by Veeam’s recent update, Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4. (* Disclosure below.)
[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]
Multicloud’s something I’ve been hearing from Veeam for a number of years. Talk to us about why it is relevant to the IBM Think event, why Veeam’s here at this show.
Russell: The short version of it is we believe that all organizations are really multicloud today, whether they realize it or not, and are going to be more multicloud in the future. What I mean by that, if you think about availability, backup and recovery, and replication, it’s Azure, Azure Stack, it’s AWS, it’s private cloud, it’s obviously what you have on-premise, and it’s the stuff you haven’t even thought about tomorrow. If you want to make a little adjacent stretch, you can put software as a service in there too. It’s about really offering protection but also portability.
IBM has a lot of different pieces. Where is the intersection between Veeam and IBM?
Russell: I’m a former IBM-er, for 15-plus years, and I still live in Tucson where IBM storage has a big presence. So it’s everything from tape — we still believe that tape has a role to play — it’s the servers that they offer, as well as GTS, global services, and IBM Cloud, of course we interact with. But there’s storage arrays, virtualization solutions, all of that we have hooks and integration into today.
You are alluding to some of the functionality of the latest Veeam update. This new release, what is it called?
Russell: It’s a long name, it’s Version 9.5 Update 4. The importance of it belies the nomenclature. The reality is it’s the biggest in our history. A couple of the capabilities from a cloud perspective alone; we’ve got this kind of cloud mobility that we spoke about. Take any workload, on-premises, or physical, virtual, that’s running in your shop, and to be able to move it somewhere else. Really, two-click restores to be able to get to Azure, Azure Stack, AWS. From an IBM perspective it can definitely support IBM Cloud in that.
We’ve got Veeam Availability Suite for AWS, where we can take instances running on AWS, like MongoDB, Cassandra, and bring that back; you may want to bring that back for safekeeping, or even transformation on-prem, to a Veeam instance.
We’ve got other kinds of interesting things too, not least of which is called Cloud Tier. It sounds like an archive solution; it’s really not. We, underneath the covers, take what’s already on-premises for you, let’s say you’re a Veeam shop today, and we can take out those unused blocks, unbeknownst to you, and stage those off to object storage, and we can optimize how we do that. We, essentially, enact a source-side deduplication of optimizing the blocks in the cloud, and then we leave uninterrupted access to it on-prem. You don’t ever have to know it’s in the cloud, change your behavior, change the application to update it. Those are just a couple of the many things that we introduced.
IBM has a long tradition with cloud service providers and managed service providers. Where does Veeam interact at that layer of the ecosystem?
Russell: We have really 21,000 different Veeam cloud service providers today, some of which manage over 1 million different machine instances, just themselves. So we did a number of updates for them as well. That’s actually one of the tape-integration points. We now offer tenant-to-tape if you’re a cloud service provider to offer an additional capability. We offer the engine that people can build a backup as a service, disaster recovery as a service, a solution around.
Multicloud isn’t simple for the enterprise today. Where is the industry doing well? Can you give a critical eye as to what the industry must do to make things better for customers?
Russell: The number one thing I’d say is, have a design, have a plan. Don’t be haphazard. Just about every organization is multicloud, because no matter what size you are, somebody somewhere has deployed something in a cloud or two, or more. If you just throw software as a service into that, it is just geometrically expanding. It hasn’t been a conscious design strategy. Don’t fall into this haphazard way of growth.
Where does Veeam fit into the security picture when it comes to multicloud, things like ransomware and the like?
Russell: Unfortunately, things are going to happen, and we know this because things are already happening to a number of organizations. It doesn’t really take too long to find somebody that’s been affected by this already, and so when that happens, you need some first-level step of remediation. You need to get back as fast as you can to known good-copy of your data.
But ransomware typically lies dormant before it actually deploys the payload, so you don’t know exactly how far back you need to go. With [Veeam’s portability] capacity, you could [have another offline, bulkheaded copy] and go back only so far as you need to. You could verify exactly when the vulnerability was introduced, but do that in a way that’s sandboxed, isolated off the network, and not putting you at risk.
Give us a little look forward. What should we be expecting to see from Veeam through 2019?
Russell: We’re focused a lot on increasing scale. We believe that we’re a very easy-to-use solution; people say [Veeam is] simple, flexible, reliable. We want to keep enhancing that but we’re looking at additional workloads to protect all the time, cloud capabilities to expand upon, new ways to take what has always been a data-protection company, and make it a data management company.
We have the largest, we believe, storage software investment in history, of 500 million, and we ended last year with a rich cash reserve. So, now, instead of busy trying to do stuff, we’re also looking at what else do we need to, potentially, acquire.
Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: Veeam Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Veeam nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
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