Veeam Delivers on Kasten Data Protection Integration Promise
As part of an update to the Veeam Backup & Replication platform, Veeam Software today integrated the Kasten backup and recovery tools it acquired for Kubernetes environments with the management framework it provides to enable IT teams to centrally manage data protection processes.
Danny Allan, CTO and senior vice president for product strategy at Veeam Software, says as IT environments become more diverse the need to centrally manage backup and recovery processes is becoming more acute. Most IT teams will not want to have to deploy a separate management platform for every type of IT environment.
Overall, Veeam claims to have more than 400,000 customers that are using its platforms to protect data, while Veeam Backup & Replication has been downloaded more than 300,000 times.
Veeam acquired Kasten last year; the company now operates as Kasten by Veeam. Most recently, Kasten by Veeam released a 4.5 update that added support for lighter-weight K3s distribution of Kubernetes and those that are managed via the Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere distribution of Kubernetes. Version 4.5 of Kasten K10 has added support for Kafka, Apache Cassandra, K8ssandra and the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) running on Kubernetes clusters.
Version 11a of Veeam Backup & Replication, meanwhile, is due out later this month and also adds deeper integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Specifically, Veeam has expanded backup and recovery capabilities to add support for Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) and Microsoft Azure SQL Databases in addition to support for Amazon Simple Storage Service ( S3) Glacier, S3 Glacier Deep Archive, Microsoft Azure Archive Storage and Google Cloud Archive storage to enable IT teams to reduce archival costs. There are now also integrations with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and Azure Key Vault as well as support for role-based access controls.
Finally, Veeam has added support for the Nutanix AHV hypervisor and Windows 10 21H1 along with deeper support for Windows Server 2022, IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris platforms. The continuous data protection (CDP) capability has also been enhanced to add support for VMware VSAN and VMware Virtual Volumes (vVOLs). Veeam is also adding support for Red Hat Virtualization, which enables virtual machines running monolithic applications to be encapsulated in containers that can be deployed on a cluster running the Red Hat OpenShift distribution of Kubernetes.
As data protection continues to evolve, Allan says IT teams should expect to see machine learning algorithms playing a larger role. Veeam already employs algorithms to identify, for example, misconfigurations that could cause backup data corruption. The goal is to leverage automation to make organizations more resilient at a time when ransomware attacks that encrypt an organization’s data have become a scourge. The best defense against those attacks remains having access to a pristine copy of data that can be quickly made available, notes Allan.
One way or another, data protection is becoming a larger issue within Kubernetes environments that are more frequently running stateful applications. The issue many IT teams are struggling with is how best to protect that data within the context of an existing set of backup and recovery processes.
