The last day of VeeamON 2017. My head is hurting from all the great information that Veeam and other vendors have brought to the table. Today I’ve written about the highlights of the 3rd day!

General Session

In the main hall again with the big screen, we were able to see more of Veeam’s tech!

Veeam demos of:

  • Veeam’s Powered Network (PN) (Simply VPN connections from remote locations to Azure)
  • Backing up of Exchange Mailboxes (via User or Groups)

Peter McKay Co-CEO and President of Veeam announces their HP Partner with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). He also talked about a lot of HPE’s acquisitions (Nimble, SimpliVity). The storage business is changing. Thinned it, Dedup, Always on, Replicate it. HP Resellers can resell Veeam.

Azure

I think everyone has heard about Azure. And everyone knows who Mark Russinovich is. Well Mr. Russinovich, the Microsoft Azure CTO, took the stage not to talk about Azure and what it is, but to present about the business aspect of using Azure.

From a technical perspective, it’s very easy to think of virtualizing a machine and moving it from one location to another. Pretty simple, but Mark brought up some great points around Digital Transformation, the Role of businesses transforming themselves. Businesses need to transform the way they work internally and how they do business online.

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud. What differentiates their cloud with other public clouds and your private cloud? Well Azure is continually transforming and innovating.

 

Azure has:

  • Over 55 certifications
  • 2 new Azure Regions in Africa (Total of 40 worldwide)
  • 85% of Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIFI) use Azure. (Only about 25 GSIFSI banks worldwide)

Now keep in mind, using a public cloud isn’t all or nothing. You can even use some services and incorporate it with any other form of cloud. But keep this in mind, your data is important. Azure and other clouds do their best to protect your data, but if you want to protect your data and have multiple copies, you need to use a cloud based Availability company, like Veeam! With Azure constantly transforming and constantly innovating to support customer workloads, sleep well at night using Veeam products. They Just Work!

Azure Advantages

  • Microsoft Power Apps. A Power company went from 6 months and paper to 14 Power Apps. 15% cost decrease
  • SQL Service license mobility – Move the workload between on-premises and cloud
  • Patching is done transparently in the public cloud. Geo replicated, always online
  • IaaS – “Lifting and Shifting”
  • Azure Functions – Serverless
    • Deploy code to Azure, executes anytime an event is told to trigger.
    • Example: Image Resizing. Whenever a new image comes to my storage, resize the image and save into a different storage. Look at twitter feeds. Dev never has to create a VM, just deploy code. No server, no scaling. Only charged for consumption of reasons when they run. Dev creates triggers.
    • The Point – There is no server to manage.

The key to digital transformation is IT that enables and partners with their businesses.

 


Customer Story – Baloise Bank

Baloise Bank (Swiss Bank) Customer Story and how they save money with replication and backup with Veeam.

Check out an interview with Markus Marksteiner, CTO, Baloise Group during VeeamON 2017 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prYnclfxv3Q

HP – Data Protection – Presented by Bill Philbin, Senior VP, HPE. GM Storage and Big Data solution

Here is a scenario that Bill presents. It’s a common one that everyone can relate to. Trying to get a hold of someone and they don’t answer their phone. What do you do after that!?

  • A cell phone is no longer a phone
    • No one answers a call
    • Voicemail is always full
    • Text them right after the call
      • They instantly text you back
      • You instantly call back… yet no answer

Everyone relies on Google. You expect Google to be there to help you.

  • “What do we do without google?”
  • What happens when the phone doesn’t work???? That’s where we are in life.

Other life dependencies

  • Airport – We need Uber
  • We need Face time / Skype

The Point –

  • You always have the phone
  • The phone is always on
  • You don’t think about how it’s protected. It is backed up to Cloud. Google, iCloud, Azure
  • We raise our children this way…. (YAY???)

We don’t think about data recovery, it’s just there

Let’s move this discussion into our Data Centers. We don’t think like that. We’ve been trained not to. It’s just the way we’ve always done business. Essentially we always think about Data Protect in our own Data Centers. When you go to a big box electronic store and buy an electronic item, they sell protection. Mortgage insurance, you can buy protection. We expect this, but yet in the DC, it’s the last thing. Data protection and availability. It’s Hard.

“Storage Providers have moral obligations. Streamlined, simple, like your phone, like a web service on Azure, etc” – HP is doing that. Strong partnerships with Veeam and Nimble. HP also announced – Cloudbank service from Cloud 1 to S3 type cloud provider.

The though process from any end user should be –

  • I don’t care where my application runs
  • I know it’s backed up and replicated
  • Most importantly, it’s always available

Together, HPE and Veeam are Re-Thinking avail and protection. How do they do this? HP offers Recovery Manager Central (RMC 4.1) – Accelerated data recovery and granular item restore with Veeam integration. Instance granular app item recovery with RMC + Veeam Explorer.

I want to just reiterate; Replication is not backup – it replicates errors. If you have data corruption, you’ll just end up replicating the errors to the other copies. Backups allow you to go to a place farther back in time and pull a recovery before the error occurs.

Customer Panel

Now that a lot of information and demos have been shown. Everybody is on the same page and the wheels are turning on how they can use this new technology. Well to help solidify some ideas, a 4-person customer panel was brought onto the stage to talk about how they worked with Veeam.

  • Kevin Ragsdale – Director of Information Technology at Hard Rock Hotel, LV
  • Colin Chatelier – Cloud and Platform Deutch Bank (7.6million external, 55k internal customers)
  • Markus Marksteiner – CTO, Baloise Group
  • Danny Allan – Vice President of Cloud Integration and Alliance Strategy at Veeam

After Party

Well what an after party! Oh yes like most conferences, there is a thank you party. You’ve spent a lot of time away from work and money too. Regardless of who paid for it, the time investment and learning is great. Usually you’re in tunnel vision mode at work, and after spending a few days with vendors and filling your brain in the breakout session, it’s time for the vendors to give back and say thank you!

VeeamON 2018

Well if you didn’t make it to VeeamON 2017, you can always join us at VeeamON 2018 in Chicago! Below is a picture of Peter McKay and Ratmir Timashev announcing the location of VeeamON 2018.

You can subscribe for updates and register at https://www.veeam.com/veeamon

See you there!