Johannesburg, 17 Nov 2015
Veeam Availability Suite v9, which was announced recently, includes a new storage capability that dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership of backup storage, lowers hardware costs and radically simplifies backup storage. Veeam Availability Suite, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication, leverages virtualisation, storage, and cloud technologies that enable the modern data centre to help organisations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs.
Warren Olivier, Veeam Software Country Manager Southern Africa, says a significant enhancement for South African businesses is v9's cloud connect replication features, which allow customers to replicate entire virtual machines in the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional disaster recovery.
"Because disaster recovery and backup were traditionally seen as a 'grudge purchase', much like insurance, many local businesses have not made adequate DR provision," he says. "Veeam Availability Suite v9 is hardware agnostic and does not lock users into a particular cloud service provider for any particular length of time. This means they can benefit from disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) simply, affordably, and for only the period they need to - for example, during their peak season when they absolutely cannot afford to risk downtime."
Olivier expects this to lower the barrier for smaller and mid-size companies that may not have had the resources to run a physical DR site. "This is particularly exciting for us in South Africa, where the market is very cost sensitive, and compliance has become increasingly important," he says.
"With our recent global survey indicating that enterprises are stepping up their focus on DRaaS and backup as a service, we are currently educating our channel partners on the opportunities in offering these services to their customers."
Another enhancement likely to resonate with South African Veeam customers is v9's new Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) features, which simplify the management of geographically dispersed offices. "v9 enhances WAN acceleration and reduces the amount of traffic that needs to travel over the network to optimise the bandwidth used and simplify remote office management by leveraging the use of local resources at the remote site," says Olivier.
Veeam has also expanded its alliance partner portfolio, notes Olivier. "We are now starting to integrate our solutions into the hardware customers are already running on site, and helping them to optimise the throughput and performance of their existing infrastructure." Veeam now integrates with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NetApp, and EMC, to name but a few.
Share