Information technology (IT) availability company Veeam is improving the integration of its availability suite of products into the software and hardware capabilities of other companies to better leverage these systems, says Veeam Software Southern Africa regional manager Warren Olivier.

It has expanded its point-in-time copy Storage Snapshot integration with cloud computing company EMC systems, similar to those available for IT company HP and data management company Netapp.

The solution enables the storage array to take a snapshot of all data including of objects (such as individual files) and folders (such as containers of related files or compressed datasets) in storage, reducing the need to move data within a data centre.

Further, the company has also improved the data deduplication at source functionality for EMC systems, which improves the speed and efficiency of backups.

“We are continuously improving the integration of our solutions with the systems of the largest information and communication technology systems and infrastructure vendors, including [networking major] Cisco, Netapp, [virtualisation major] VMware, and [software giant] Microsoft, to name but a few.”

The company also released a new disaster-recovery service feature last month, which is free to all Veeam customers and enables Veeam systems to replicate to any cloud.

“We extended the Cloud Connect capabilities, not only enabling backups to the cloud, but now also enable replication-disaster recovery as a service to be made into a cloud. The main benefit is that customers only have to rent cloud storage space and do not have to worry about any other applications, agents, or complex virtual private networks settings. Traffic for this service is run over Secure Sockets Layer and is encrypted.”

Many companies want to leverage their virtualised environments and third-party services, but do not want to risk any downtime or disaster scenario. With this extended Cloud Connect capability, this risk is removed and all their processes and applications can be recovered within minutes, if there were to be a disaster, he explains.

This zero-interference backup system also enables Veeam customers to significantly reduce and even eliminate scheduled downtime, avers Olivier.

“The amount of control available to customers to ensure that they can recover from any disaster scenario also means that they are using these recovery capabilities to ensure uptime, even during their routine maintenance, as well as reduce unplanned downtime to less than fifteen minutes for all applications.”

Further, transaction-level recovery of Structured Query Language (SQL) databases has also been made available for Microsoft SQL servers.

All these releases are in preparation for the release of the Veeam availability suite Version 9 in the next quarter, he adds.

“Demand for virtualisation tools is growing, since many companies are at the crucial 60% to 80% virtualisation stage of their in-house systems, where many smaller virtualisation tools become ineffective. Smaller companies use virtualisation to gain the maximum benefit from their IT expenditure, while larger companies generally aim to improve efficiencies and responsiveness, as well as reduce business risks, including those caused by downtime.”

Many tier-one workloads are being virtualised because companies can expect tier-one availability of 99.5% for their virtualised environments owing to availability solutions, emphasises Olivier.

Meanwhile, Veeam has also introduced end-to-end encryption of backup files at rest and during transit, which does not affect network acceleration or compression functionalities.

“Our systems are designed for virtualisation, and companies can virtualise additional system components to improve efficiencies without reducing the availability of such systems,” he concludes.