VeeamON – VeeamOFF. My take on VeeamON 2017

Introduction – VeeamON

Wow what a week in sunny New Orleans! VeeamON 2017 was held between the 16th and 18th May at the Ernest N. Morial Convention centre with around 3000+ people in attendance. It was a great opportunity to catch up with old friends, hook up with digital amigos in real life and meet new people. There was a real buzz of excitement at the venue and an eclectic mix of people. The great thing about this type of event is its appeal to a broader audience, not everyone there was focussed on one particular product set. Yes the common theme was Veeam and availability but it was not a mass gathering of VMware people or Hyper-V people or insert your favourite technology people. Being able to engage with such a demographic was refreshing as there were new things to talk about, to challenge or to expand on.

So what were my thoughts on the event and what did I enjoy the most? Please read on to find out;

Announcements

Without a shadow of a doubt, the Veeam V10 announcements were stellar. I don’t think I have seen so many great new features announced ever for a .next product. High level, the following product updates and enhancements were announced:

  • Veeam Continuous Data Protection for replicas
    • Leveraging vSphere VAIO API, Veeam can rewind to a point in time broken down by minutes to allow quick recovery of critical workloads that demand the highest evels of protection in terms of RPO and RTO.
    • Can also be leveraged with integration to Veeam Cloud Service Providers offering Cloud Connect Replication.
  • Veeam Cloud Connect will have full support for the latest vCloud director
  • Veeam Availability Orchestrator
    • Allows for easy execution and documentation of your disaster recovery plan. Think of it as Veeam replication failover plans on steroids + more.
    • More info here: https://go.veeam.com/orchestration
  • Veeam Cloud Connect Tape as a service
    • Service providers will be able to leverage tape systems to deliver further protection and “tape out” services for Cloud Connect tenants.
  • Veeam Backup for Office 365 v1.5 and v2.0
    • V1.5 to deliver API support and Multi Tenancy support.
    • V2.0 to offer support for Office 365 SharePoint and OneDrive for business.
  • Veeam Agent for Windows was made generally available
  • Backup for NFS and SMB shares
    • Granular backup of files from NAS devices or file shares with versioning control and extensive scheduling options.
  • Object storage support
    • Think Azure blob storage, Amazon S3 or on premises object storage. This can be leveraged as part of a scale out backup repository and set to be an _archive_ tier. For example a backup file has reached a certain age, policy will dictate that these backup files are moved to the archive tier in the scale out backup repository.
  • Veeam Availability for AWS
  • New Universal Storage API
    • Allows vendors to create their own storage integration with Veeam to allow for backups direct from storage snapshots. IBM, Lenovo and INFINIDAT will be joining the party at V10 launch.
  • Veeam Partner solutions announced
    • Veeam content pack for VMware vRealize log insight. Ship logs to log insight and allow it to pick out the key information pertinent to your Veeam environment.
    • DataGravity for Availability. DataGravity and Veeam work seamlessly together to put your backup data to work and identify potentially damaging information within your virtual machines such as credit card information, social security numbers etc. More info here https://datagravity.com/.
    • StarWind VTL for AWS and Veeam. More info can be found here: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-cloud-vtl-for-veeam.
  • VeeamPN (Veeam Powered Network)
  • Veeam management pack v8 Update 4 for SCOM

 

VLOGS

I found myself sitting in on a couple of VLOGS at VeeamON talking about community and Ransomware. It was a great experience for me and something I would like to partake in again!

First up I was talking with Dave Kawula @DaveKawula and Alan Rafuse @AlanRafuse about the IT community and the many benefits of engaging with and participating in the communities.

Follow for More Info over at Channel 9

Next up I got chatting with Tim Smith @tsmith_co and Dean Lewis @saintdle about Ransomware and GDPR amongst other things!

Follow for more info over at Tim’s Tech Thoughts

 

Veeam Vanguard Day

You may have seen on my blog that I am a proud member of the Veeam Vanguard program, for whom without I quite frankly would not have had the opportunity to visit VeeamON in the first place. I am eternally grateful for Veeam and their awesome team for making the whole thing possible.

The Vanguard day was ran at the same time as the Partner track day at VeeamON. We were given exclusive access to upcoming product demonstrations from Veeam and Nimble as well as partaking in a Aske Me Anything session with all the VP’s of product management in Veeam. Any question was fair game and I personally got a lot from session. Being able to present your ideas to the people who directly affect the direction in which a products development is taken really was invaluable.

VPs_Veeam

Vanny Vanguard

VeeamON 2017 featured an unofficial Vanguard mascot, @VannyVanguard who found himself in a number of situations shall we say. Search #VannyVanguard and watch out for his travels around the world until VeeamON 2018.

Here are a couple of shots of Vanny with Anton Gostev @Gostev , Ratmir Timashev and Clint Wyckoff @ClintWyckoff 

gostev_vanny

Final Thoughts – VeeamOFF

Yes VeeamON was awesome, yes you may say I’m biased but from all the folks I met, be that at the conference or at the after parties, I did not hear a bad word about it. If you have not been before I highly recommend pencilling VeeamON 2018 – Chicago into your diaries. You will not be disappointed. https://www.veeam.com/veeamon

VeeamOn2017

 

 

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2 Responses

  1. Rhys Hammond says:

    Hey digital amigo, Great write-up!

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