Backup storage growing problem for enterprises, Veeam steps in

Veeam Software is rolling out its Veeam Availability Suite v9 which includes a new, Unlimited Scale-out Backup Repository.

According to the vendor, the new storage capability reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) of backup storage, lowers hardware costs and simplifies backup storage management.

Veeam says, managing backup storage is an enormous and expensive task, and it is exacerbated by the fact that data growth is outpacing the ability of legacy solutions to manage it efficiently and cost-effectively.

"Both production and protection storage volumes are growing around 40% year-over-year, while data protection budgets are growing roughly one-tenth of that," according to Jason Buffington, ESG senior data protection analyst.

"The irony is that IT is being asked to increase their availability and agility to recover, but aren't even able to maintain the status quo with legacy approaches to backup, in part due to storage requirements," he says.

On top of this, availability requirements demanding RTPOs (recovery time and point objectives) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data, today's enterprises are facing the real challenge of ensuring optimum levels of availability with a data protection budget that cannot keep pace, Veeam says.

The Availability Suite v9 is the vendor's response to this problem.

"With Veeam, enterprise IT can go beyond legacy backup to embrace true data center availability for all data and applications," says Ratmir Timashev, Veeam CEO.

"Our new Unlimited Scale-out Backup Repository capability is another example of how we're taking full advantage of new technologies to improve availability for the enterprise.

"In this case, the result is dramatic simplification and cost reduction for backup storage management, making it easier and more cost effective to provide 'always-on' performance," he says.

The Veeam Unlimited Scale-out Backup Repository creates a single backup repository from a collection of almost any storage devices.

Using this feature, enterprises can increase backup storage capacity by adding a storage device to the single pool; leverage existing storage resources, including disk space that typically goes unused; and assign backup files to separate storage devices.

"The contradiction between the need to raise IT resiliency and agility while trying to reduce storage burdens is adding complexity and burden to many folks' IT infrastructures," says Buffington.

"Veeam's new Unlimited Scale-out Backup Repository should help alleviate those burdens by simplifying backup target storage, which ought to further ease administration while providing flexibility to backup and virtualisation administrators who have more strategic tasks to do than managing their underlying storage pool," he says.

Veeam Availability Suite v9 will be generally available later this year.