Veeam adds Hyper-V support to Backup & Replication

It’s quite a departure for a company so tied to the VMware stable but Veeam has today announced it is adding support for Windows Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V server to its Veeam Back-up and Replication product.

The announcement was made today at Microsoft Tech-Ed in Atlanta by Veeam chief executive and president Ratmir Timashev, who told Cloud Pro his product was the only one which combined not only back-up and replication, but also the functionality for both VMware and Microsoft – putting the company in a unique position.

The decision, he admits, raised a few eyebrows at VMware but the reality is that many organisations are running a multi-hypervisor environment and providing one solution to work with both VMware and Hyper-V gives Veeam a solid market advantage.

“We decided to extend the functionality of at least our back-up product to Hyper-V because we believe there will be a substantial market – there already is and it’s growing – especially as (Microsoft takes) a very large share of the... small business and very small business segment,” he said.

“Finally Hyper-V has become good - or good enough - for SMBs, who are more price sensitive to feature-rich products. “

Timashev said the competition between VMware and Microsoft was becoming more and more about management over functionality as the Hyper-V product continued to improve and Microsoft had many advantages in this area.

Veeam’s rereleased Back-up and Replication hypervisor support product includes near-continuous data protection, technology for changed block tracking (to enable fast and efficient back-up and replication), and de-duplication and compression.

The product doesn’t have V-Power support for Hyper-V, but Timashev that would be in place for the next version (version 7). Version 6 will be available in the UK in the fourth quarter of 2011.