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Data center availability specialist Veeam announced two products—FastSCP for Microsoft Azure and Management Pack (MP) v8 for Microsoft System Center—to help customers adopt Microsoft’s hybrid cloud as part of their IT strategy.
FastSCP is designed to simplify and accelerate the use of a hybrid cloud, a free tool that provides simple file copy between on-premises and Azure-based virtual machines (VMs) and transfers data over HTTPS, thus not requiring a virtual private network (VPN) tunnel between the on-premises deployment and Azure.
“Hybrid strategies are attractive because they allow a business to get the best of both worlds,” Doug Hazelman, vice president of product strategy at Veeam, told eWEEK. “Businesses typically have a substantial investment in on-premises infrastructure that they can’t just give up. At the same time, the cloud offers significant advantages for new applications or for scaling existing applications during bursts of exceptionally heavy activity.”
In addition, scheduled file copy jobs can be configured for periodic copies to and from Azure VMs, and job setup requires just a few clicks inside a wizard-driven user interface.
“In the age of mobile applications, ease of use has become more important than ever,” Hazelman said. “Consumers and even IT pros expect applications to be easy to learn and use as well as easy to configure and administer. The expectation today is that software should ‘just work.’ Veeam has a long history of developing tools and software that are intuitive to use and solve real-world problems in innovative ways.”
Version 8 of Management Pack builds on the product’s advanced monitoring, alert management and reporting foundation with support for the latest on-premises hypervisor platforms and hybrid cloud planning tools.
Among the features is an infrastructure summary report, which provides a single, high-level report view of the virtual infrastructure, and includes achieved densities in areas such as storage over-provisioning.
The release includes enhanced analytics of on-premises workloads and predicts the appropriate infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) resources needed to run those workloads in a public cloud, including new Azure D-series VMs.
Finally, Management Pack v8 extends reporting to Azure-based backups managed by Veeam Cloud Connect for Service Providers.
“Today, Veeam is addressing the challenges around availability, which means we help ensure that our customers can have all data and applications available within 15 minutes of unplanned downtime, primarily for on-premises workloads,” Hazelman said. “As companies start to explore hybrid cloud more, there will be new challenges around availability and making sure that data and applications can be available in the event something happens in the cloud.”
He noted there are also data sovereignty considerations with cloud, which is one of the reasons Veeam is enabling local service providers to provide Veeam-powered cloud services.
General availability for FastSCP for Microsoft Azure and Management Pack v8 for System Center is planned for the third quarter of the year, with registration for the public betas of both new products currently available.