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Veeam Availability Suite V8

Keeping applications reliable and available is a key challenge for most data centers. Veeam believes its Availability Suite V8 is the best answer but it depends upon if you rely solely on x86-based solutions.
Written by Dan Kusnetzky, Contributor

Doug Hazelman, VP of Product Strategy at Veeam, dropped by to discuss the success of Veeam Availability Suite version 8. Veeam's goal with this product is helping enterprises and Veeam partners develop highly available virtual environments hosted on industry standard x86 systems.

How Veeam describes Availability Suite v8

Here's how the company describes the features of version 8 of its Availability Suite:

Veeam Availability Suite™ combines industry leading backup, restore and replication capabilities of Veeam Backup & Replication™ with the advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning functionality of Veeam ONE™. Veeam Availability Suite delivers everything you need to reliably protect and manage your VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments giving you:

  • High-speed recovery
  • Data loss avoidance
  • Verified protection
  • Leveraged data
  • Complete visibility

Snapshot analysis

Hazelman and I enjoyed our usual debate about whether a tool that focuses only on industry standard x86-based solutions can be accurately described as supporting "data center availability."It's my position that modern data centers are very complex environments typically housing mainframes, midrange UNIX systems, industry standard x86-based systems as well as intelligent power, communications and storage equipment. Something that supports only the x86-based environment, while very useful to many enterprises, still can't be the total solution for reliability and availability.

That being said, Veeam is offering what is clearly a powerful and feature-rich set of tools for virtual environments executing on x86-based systems. When I have had an opportunity to speak with Veeam customers, nearly all of them have stories of how Veeam quickly saved them from what appeared at first to be a disaster. This new release brings that level of capability to Microsoft Hyper-V-based environments as well as the VMware environments earlier versions of the software supported.

Is this enough for your organization? While Veeam isn't trying to support every possible data center environment, it is trying to address the needs of enterprises with critical applications hosted on x86 virtual environments. Can the company address your needs? It would be wise to speak with Veeam and a few of its customers or partners, you just may find that they do just enough for you.

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