Top New Features in Veeam Backup & Replication v8

We are now a couple of months out from the release of version 8 of Veeam Software’s flagship product Backup & Replication. Since then we’ve seen the first patch release a couple of weeks after, almost a Veeam tradition, and I’ve had it deployed and running for a while now. In that time I’ve found a lot to really like in the new version.

End to End Encryption

Backup & Replication now has the ability to encrypt your backup data from the moment it leaves your production storage system, through the LAN and WAN traffic and once it is at rest, either on disk or tape. This encryption is protected by password stored both with humans as well as within the Enterprise Manager database keeping you from losing backups. Finally the encryption does not change ratios for either compression or deduplication of the backup data.

Resource Conservation Improvements

Quite a few of the new Backup & Replication features are geared towards keeping your RPO goals from getting in the way of production efficiency. First and foremost is the availability of Backup I/O Control, a feature that will monitor the latency of your production storage system and if measured metrics climb above a user defined level will throttle backup operations to return systems to acceptable levels.

On the networking side if you have redundant or other none production WAN links you now have the ability to specify preferred networks for backup data, with failover to production if it isn’t available. Further the WAN Accelerator for site to site backup copy and replication has been improved to allow for up to 3x what was seen in v7.

Cloud Connect

Both of the above features make this one possible. With this new version brings a new partnership opportunity where VARs and other cloud storage service providers have the ability to directly act as a repository for your backup data. These providers can then allow you to spin these backups up as part of a second offering or as part of a package. With this the need to own, manage and maintain the hardware for a DR site becomes much lighter and I personally believe this will be a big deal for many in the SMB space.

New Veeam Explorers for Recovery

Veeam has been phasing out the use of the U-AIR wizards for item level restore for a while but with v8 we now have the release of the Explorers for Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange. The Active Directory one is particularly of note because it not only allows you to restore a deleted AD item but do so with the password intact.  Transaction log backup for SQL servers is also now supported allowing for point in time restore. The Exchange option has a few new features but I especially like the option of recovering hard-deleted items.

These are frankly just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the new features. For more on what’s new I recommend you checkout the What’s New documents for both Backup & Replication as well as for VeeamONE, Veeam’s virtualization infrastructure monitoring package.