SFD5 Prep Work: Veeam

Veeam have a long history of presenting at various Field Days, as you can see here. I wrote about them for Tech Field Day 9, in a prep post here, and in a review here.

Going on past performances, we can expect that Veeam will be presenting some sort of major product announcement at SFD5. Veeam V8 is coming out in the second half of the year, so perhaps we’ll be doing a “what’s new in V8″ session?

Veeam just announced they’re going to support NetApp snapshots in V8, so I reckon that’s a solid bet for at least part of what we’ll cover.

Veeam and NetApp

This partnership announcement is interesting because, contrary to that El Reg article, NetApp do have their own backup software: SnapManager, including a version specifically for VMs, SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure.

I’ve never really liked SnapManager. Back when I used to do NetApp architectures, the different types of SnapManager didn’t talk to one another, so there was no central point of control for the backup admins, and it wouldn’t integrate with other backup software that these heterogeneous environments used (like NetBackup, Tivoli, CommVault, etc.). We would joke that NetApp needed to create SnapManager for SnapManager.

NetApp started integrating snapshot management into Operations Manager, but it only worked in a very limited set of cases, and it didn’t talk to SnapManager. I seem to remember SnapManager didn’t support vFilers when we first looked at it, and I know Operations Manager struggled with them in early versions too. vFilers were always second-class citizens compared to non-virtual Filers. Maybe it’s better now, but as far as I can tell you still can’t do in-place 7-mode to C-mode upgrades yet, and you’d think that’d be more important to fix first.

Anyway, it’s interesting that NetApp are now partnering with Veeam. Unlike SnapManager, people seem to love them some Veeam, so perhaps NetApp have finally thrown in the towel on their own attempts at writing backup software, or at least given customers a decent alternative. I’ll be sure to drill into how the integration with NetApp snapshots (and SnapVault, and SnapMirror) works, because I know waaaay too much about them and the painful cases where they don’t work well.

Other Options

If we don’t talk about Veeam and NetApp snapshots, I’m not sure what other new big-ish features we’ll be discussing.

Let’s go with some wild speculation. Then I can claim I’m brilliant if any of my guesses pay off. ;)

Veeam can already back up to lots of public clouds with their Cloud Edition, so perhaps we’ll learn about how it can target various private cloud things, like OpenStack? That’s not super-compelling, unless you want to be able to use your own gear like a public cloud.

Maybe Veeam will announce one or two other partnerships with storage array vendors. That might be a little tricky politically, given how recent the NetApp announcement was. If Veeam came out saying they have an EMC partnership as well, that’d be weird. EMC already has a backup product of their own in NetWorker (née Legato), so it’s highly unlikely. As El Reg mentioned, maybe HDS or Fujitsu or Dell? Even then, announcing another major storage array partnership this soon would put noses out of joint at NetApp.

Perhaps Veeam will announce some sort of networking partnership, maybe with Riverbed or similar around WAN acceleration? Alternately, maybe some sort of “software defined networking” company alliance, though I can’t think of any immediate benefits to Veeam. They already partner with Cisco to make VM restores on UCS faster. It won’t be VMware and VNX though, given the shenanigans at PEX.

Whatever it is, we’ll have a good time. It’s always fun getting right into the tech with the Veeam folks, and we know they’re not afraid of a whiteboard.

We’ll find out soon enough!