Leading in Cloud Data Management
We’re excited to announce Veeam’s acquisition of Kasten, the leader in data backup, disaster recovery and mobility for Kubernetes. Veeam has admired Kubernetes-native approach and recently announced a partnership with Kasten in May 2020. In many ways, Kasten’s approach to Kubernetes mirrors the approach of Veeam to vSphere in the early days of virtualization. In collaboration with a passionate set of customers, they developed and delivered a Kubernetes-native data management experience designed for cloud-native applications. Simple and fast to deploy, agnostic to infrastructure, familiar in experience to DevOps teams, and meeting a critical application need, Kasten has quickly established a market leadership position.
Veeam’s acquisition of Kasten is the next step in a strong partnership and shared sense of passion for delivering cloud data management. It also represents a testament and critical milestone in our commitment to support our customers’ business transformation to future-ready architectures.
Evolution of the market
The past few decades have brought technology changes at an increasingly accelerated pace. We’ve witnessed a shift in infrastructure from mainframe, to client-server, to virtualized workloads and now to the cloud. In parallel with this infrastructure shift, we’ve seen application design “shift to the left” with greater involvement from development than ever before. In fact, app builders and developers often lead the charge in transforming business services, internally and externally, to deliver greater operational efficiency, increased productivity and lower costs of Day 2 operations. It has given birth to a whole new segment of application development methodology known as DevOps, which is designed to improve quality, increase scalability and accelerate application delivery while reducing daily management.
A critical component of this infrastructure and application modernization is found with containers. Gartner has predicted that by 2022, 75% of enterprises will be running containers in production. The 451 Group estimates that 95% of all new enterprise applications will be using containers. And finally, in an upcoming ESG report due out in November, they found that of those customers with a containers initiative, they expect that fully one third of their workloads would be running in containers within 24 months. This is a massive and rapid shift in the industry towards the modernization of workloads.
Why is the shift occurring? The simple fact is that containerized workloads offer significant benefits to customers of all sizes. Analysis by VMware indicates that customers can expect an 82% increase in software to production, 37% increase in developer productivity, 78% increase in operational efficiency, 93% increase in ability to scale the platform and 92% less time to patch the platform. All these benefits add up to increased business velocity with a reduced cost of operations.
Modernizing data management
As an organization modernizes its infrastructure and application delivery, it also makes sense to modernize the data management capabilities and platform. Veeam recognized this necessity at the advent of virtualization and built a $1 billion dollar business across all market segments with a purpose-built solution for the virtualized data center. This requirement played out yet again with the recent delivery of cloud-native data management capabilities for the AWS, Azure and Microsoft 365 as part of Veeam Cloud Data Management Platform.
Why is a native purpose-build solution so important for containers and especially the dominant containers orchestration platform – Kubernetes? The table below highlights the key reasons that we consistently hear from customers.
Modernizing application delivery is a fundamental shift in philosophy and culture, rather than a simple technology change. This shift requires modernized cloud data management techniques.
Introducing Kasten: Industry leader and purpose-built
Kasten’s approach to Kubernetes data management matches perfectly to the necessity to modernize the business. Their approach was founded on 4 principles:
- Application-Centric – Unlike most other Kubernetes backup vendors in the space which
manage backup at the storage layer, Kasten focuses on the application as the
data management operational unit. This focus on the application enables the
customer to abstract the complexity and diversity of the infrastructure.
- Kubernetes Native – Built specifically for cloud-native environments, the Kubernetes
approach handles dynamic applications with ease and provides for fast and
simple deployment and management.
- Multi-Cloud – The K10 platform was designed to run on any public or private
cloud Kubernetes deployment allowing the customer the flexibility of choice. Further,
this model futureproofs the customer as it enables the seamless movement of
applications across the underlying infrastructure.
- Database Aware – True application awareness requires robust data protection and migration specifically tailored and optimized for the database. The K10 platform includes support for popular relational and NoSQL databases.
This approach culminated in the easy-to-use, scalable and secure K10 platform. K10 is quick to deploy and easy to use via a modern web-based management interface or a cloud-native API. Its versatility and flexibility mean that it supports a rich ecosystem of components and supports user choice to pick the best tools of infrastructure for the business. Finally, security is built into the platform with a comprehensive end-to-end security model including enterprise-grade encryption, identity and access management roles, role-based access controls and more.
You can read more about the Kasten and the 5 Kubernetes Backup Best Practices in the Veeam + Kasten joint white paper.
Veeam + Kasten: 1 + 1 = 3. Better Together
The truly exciting component of this acquisition is what Veeam and Kasten bring to the market as a joint solution.
- Breadth of data management
The combination of Veeam and Kasten enables our customers to have a comprehensive and industry leading backup and DR solutions across the private, public and multi-cloud environments. The breadth of support for physical, virtual and cloud-based infrastructures, as well as traditional and cloud-native applications, is unmatched in the industry and gives our customers the confidence they need to deliver on their strategic goals.
- Application-Centric alignment with the business
Both Veeam and Kasten have always focused on the unit of value for the business – the application. This application-centric approach means that the key cloud data management goals around backup & recovery, cloud mobility, monitoring & analytics, orchestration & automation, and governance & compliance can be implemented and measured at the application layer. This application-centric approach gives the customers the best possible model for measuring their business success and unleashing the business value of their data systems.
- Power of platform
As Veeam has proven, through its 2020 placement in the Gartner Magic Quadrant as the highest in Ability to Execute and the only software vendor to achieve positive movement on both axes, the Veeam Cloud Data Management Platform is the foundation on which our customers build their data management practices. With native intuitive experiences for the IT owners of SaaS, Cloud and now Kubernetes, there is still the potential to leverage the power of the platform to provide consistent centralized reporting, data management and policy application. This native experience coupled with centralized management provides the optimal experience for the end users, while providing the organizational consistency demanded by the business.
A glimpse to the future
Firstly, it is important to understand that this is a critical and strategic milestone in the Veeam journey. We intend to retain, grow and invest in the fantastic team and technology which Kasten has started and will continue to invest in contributions to the open source Kubernetes community as well. Our shared values around keeping things simple, innovating and iterating, and above all, a focus on ensuring customer’s success, will continue to motivate and drive Veeam and Kasten forward.
Similar to the Veeam cloud native solutions, such as Veeam Backup for AWS and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure (available standalone and as a part of Veeam Cloud Data Management Platform), we intend to keep a stand-alone version of the Kubernetes solution. We will continue to invest and grow this technology. The passion for customer feedback and excellence in technology, innovation, and support will not diminish.
While Kasten will continue to operate independently and form a new business unit under Niraj Tolia, Kasten’s current CEO and founder, we have already begun the journey of integrating the Kasten solution into the Veeam Platform so that our customers can achieve unified cloud data management. Longer term, as announced in our partnership earlier this year and like our other cloud native solutions, you can expect to see capabilities like unified Veeam repositories with the all the value of data movement, tiering and management that comes with it. You can expect to see Kubernetes assets visible and integrated in the Veeam Cloud Data Management Platform. And you can continue to expect to see our continued focus on simplicity, flexibility and reliability. Nothing is more fantastic than hearing our customers say: It Just Works.
Where can you learn more
I trust you have a sense of what an exciting milestone this is for us here at Veeam and Kasten. This is yet another (important) step on a journey that we are taking together with our customers, partners and the market. Our vision is to be the most trusted provider of backup solutions that deliver cloud data management.
If you want to try the Kasten K10 platform, you should do that today. You can install it on-prem or in the cloud. In fact, you can manage up to 10 nodes free – forever. Or, if you want to both hear and see more of our integration and planned roadmap, we encourage you to register and attend Veeam Live on October 20th for even more information.
- Register for Veeam – Kasten Demo at Veeam Live 2020
- Download 5 Kubernetes Backup Best Practices whitepaper