Data protection giant Veeam Software Inc. today debuted a new release of its Veeam Backup & Replication platform, set to roll out in a few days, that features what the company describes as “ransomware-safe” backup data repositories.

The release also brings a wealth of other enhancements, including a Mac client and expanded integrations with public clouds. 

Columbus, Ohio-based Veeam is a major player in the data protection software market, with annual revenues north of $1 billion. The company was acquired by Insight Partners for $5 billion early last year.

Veeam Backup & Replication v11, the new product release, introduces so-called hardened Linux repositories for storing backups. The repositories provide protection against ransomware by storing backups in a format that can’t be deleted or or encrypted. Veeam implemented the feature on Linux, which means it works in any supported Linux environment and doesn’t require specialized hardware to use.

Another tentpole addition is continuous data protection for VMware workloads. Continuous data protection is an approach to backup that involves creating a copy of every new piece of data right after it’s entered into an application. This ensures that, if an outage takes the application offline, the backup system would have all the latest information from the workload and no recently inputted records would be lost.

Besides ensuring the availability of data, another major priority in disaster recovery planning is reducing the amount of time it takes to recover that data. The sooner a workload can be recovered, the sooner the users who depend on it can return to work. Veeam Backup & Replication v11 is shipping with a new Instant Recovery feature that the company says quickly restores Microsoft SQL Server databases, Oracle databases and network-attached storage files.

The snappy restoration is made possible by technology Veeam originally developed for VMware workloads. The reason backup copies of applications normally take a long time to restore is that they’re kept in an archived form not unlike a ZIP file, which means they have to be extracted before they can be used. Veeam, using a technology called vPower, shortens the extraction process and allows the archived backup to be pulled into production faster.

Many of the other major features in today’s release focus on enhancing the product’s cloud support. To start, administrators are receiving the ability to send backups to Google Cloud Platform for storage. They can now also keep backups in Amazon S3 Glacier, Glacier Deep Archive and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Blob Archive Tier. Those services provide extremely inexpensive capacity several times cheaper than standard cloud storage, which makes them ideal for safekeeping backup data that a company doesn’t expect to use often.

Topping off the list of feature additions: a new Mac client for backing up files on workers’ Apple Inc. machines. It joins the existing clients Veeam provides for Windows, Linux, IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris.

Photo: Veeam