I’m currently attending VeeamON in Las Vegas. The green colored company, which is hosting its first show for partners and customers, has done a good job. Yes, there is space for improvement (especially on how manage a specific blogger track) but I’m sure that the feedback will help them to do even better next year.

About the show

Veeam has managed to bring some real good stuff here. The CEO’s keynote presentation done in an interview-style fashion, was brilliant and it helped Ratmir Timashev be more comfortable on stage (he looked quite nervous but with the help of the interviewer he was able to tell the story of his entrepreneurial life and Veeam very well). Much better than what you see from more established companies out there. Well done and inspiring!

I mentioned the Keynote presentation because it gives the idea of the spirit behind this event. I haven’t attended many sessionS but the few I had the opportunity to jump into where well organized and the content was interesting (I’ve seen highS and lows of course, as in any other event, the presenter always makes the difference).

The interesting stuff

Veeam-v8-300x218I won’t bother getting into the imminent release of Version 8 of the product, you can find a lot of content all over the net about it. I only want to say that it will be a major advancement in many aspects and it confirms Veeam’s technical leadership where data protection of virtualized infrastructures is concerned.

The thing I’d like to talk about is the new Veeam Free Endpoint Backup. If you take the announcement as is, it doesn’t look like a big deal: a free standalone tool to make backups of your windows PCs (and servers) is nothing to rant about. But, on the other hand, if you look at it as the first step towards a more comprehensive set of tools aimed at protecting much more than the virtualized infrastructures, it totally changes its real value.

I’m supposing that this first product, released for free and without support, will help Veeam to gather boatloads of information and build a knowledge base to develop a next generation data protection platform which will be able to cover virtualized as well as legacy (physical) environments.

Why it is important

Most enterprises already adopt a strong virtualization policy but they still have physical servers for many different reasons. Even though the number of physical servers will continue to shrink in the future, they’ll always need to be protected in some way.
Today, traditional backup solutionS do a good job of covering legacy environments and they have the ability to protect virtual infrastructures too, but they are often clunky and complex when compared to Veeam. In fact, the success of Veeam comes from the users who are adopting two different data protection strategies.

If Veeam comes up with a “good-enough” solution, capable of covering traditional infrastructures, with a set of features and ease of use similar to what is already available on the current product, They will undoubtedly continue having the same success they are experiencing today.

The Veaam Free Endpoint Backup tool will be available soon. From my point of view, If you are a Veeam customer you should download the tool as soon as you can, try it and give your feedback.

Disclaimer: I was invited to this event by Veeam they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku team.