Veeam thinks it has found backup nirvana, hoses customers with 'hyper-availability' hyperbole

Veeam customers have been hit by a wave of "hyper-availability" hyperbole.

The data protection outfit insisted businesses need to move from insurance-based, reactive data backup to a more behaviour-based system – its Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform (VHAP).

The concept was introduced at its VeeamON 2018 customer conference in Chicago, which ends today, 16 May.

Veeam claimed that data protection must evolve from basic backup and recovery schemes, mechanically copying data at prescribed intervals, to a higher level of intelligence where, it says, data learns to respond instantly and appropriately to what actually happens anywhere across the enterprise data infrastructure.

It said data needs to manage itself more autonomously, and we think this means that Veeam data stores will actually be managing themselves.

The Veeam roadmap to this happy self-managing data state has five stages:

1. Backup: Back up all workloads and ensure recoverability of data loss or attack
2. Aggregation: Manage data backup and recoverability across multi-cloud environments with an aggregated view of service-level compliance
3. Visibility: Provide monitoring, resource optimisation, capacity planning, and built-in intelligence to improve multi-cloud data management
4. Orchestration: Move data to the best location across multi-cloud environments to ensure business continuity, compliance, security, and optimal use of resources with an orchestration engine, that enables disaster recovery (DR) plans to be automatically and non-disruptively executed, tested, and documented
5. Automation: Veeam's idea of nirvana in which data becomes self-managing, via data analysis, pattern recognition, and machine learning, and so automatically backed up, migrated to ideal locations, secured during anomalous activity, and recovered instantaneously

Step five is a bit of a stretch, and Veeam doesn't say how it will provide such functionality. We might envisage a data protection monitor, watching what's going on, somehow, and invoking the orchestration engine as its data mover.

Veeam has introduced DataLabs, a product providing copy data management for use cases such as DevTest, DevOps, and DevSecOps. It includes security and forensics testing, and on-demand sandboxes for IT operations. The company said it takes the functionality of its Virtual Labs – enabling production-like instances of virtual environments on demand – and expands on it with additional use cases.

DataLabs has a self-service method for developers to dynamically spin up instances of the production environment as they design new features.

Veeam's message is that efficiencies are gained by capturing data once via the data protection process, and then repurposing that data on demand for new use cases, potentially by new users.

+Comment

We see Veeam moving up the data protection stack here, with more autonomous secondary data management coming. It's encroaching on the market space occupied by Actifio (copy data management), Cohesity (secondary data consolidation) and Rubrik (enterprise focus based on data protection). Veeam has grown up and is stretching its wings. But hyper-availability? What's next? Super-total-infinite-hyper-availability? ®