That’s a wrap! Veeam concluded another successful Red Hat Summit in Denver earlier this month. The excitement for all things Red Hat open source – including data center, public cloud, and the edge — was palpable on the tradeshow floor and in the keynote presentations. At the Veeam booth, #302, we also saw keen interest in the implications that containerization specifically has in OpenShift environments. As our Vice President of Product Management, Gaurav Rishi, said, this was the “right time, right place, and [we have] no better partner than Red Hat” to enable these containerization conversations.
Our system engineers were busy demonstrating the power of the #1 Kubernetes data protection and mobility solution, Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes, for the 5,000 total registered attendees, many of whom stopped by our booth.
Our guests also tested their luck in our “Crack the Code!” contest, where players had the chance to win an Apple Vision Pro headset.
Whether you were able to attend in person or just virtually, sit back and grab your favorite beverage as we cover some key takeaways, including Red Hat and Veeam news as well as important customer insights and trends. We’ll also share some pointers and resources to help you optimize containerized deployments in your own Red Hat environments.
Red Hat Announcements
Red Hat Summit enabled customers and partners to share product improvements, use cases, and community advancements across three major product lines: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation, and OpenShift. Each keynote featured Red Hat leadership, who unveiled their latest updates, usually featuring AI product enhancements or service extensions.
Red Hat described AI as an unprecedented opportunity to improve every part of a business, but with a critical difference compared to the advances we’ve seen so far – namely large technology companies providing AI as a proprietary, online, and SaaS delivery service. Red Hat contends that AI delivered through open source communities has already been a major contributor to its success so far, and open-source AI models and run-time engines play an essential role in the explosive adoption of AI. To support open source AI growth, Red Hat announced IBM’s release of Granite large language models via Hugging Face,and Red Hat similarly released the InstructLab project on GitHub to train AI models. Red Hat also covered how AI growth in power consumption (predicted to grow by 10x by 2026) requires observability via the Kepler project and secure delivery via the Sigstore project.
Red Hat’s CTO, Chris Wright, projected that while today, businesses run 100% on applications, in a few years, the norm will be to run a mix of 50% applications and 50% AI models. If this hypothesis is true and we assume that most applications will not be retired in the coming years, then IT will end up doubling the number of their managed entities and operations. This has major implications for the infrastructure required to host AI model workloads, including the large resource cost in GPU acceleration and memory and the potential doubling of resource needs. To address the huge potential growth of AI consumption, Red Hat argues that open source can make resource consumption, training, and operations more efficient in the future.
As the industry leader in data protection, the Veeam booth was busy fielding questions about virtual machine (VM) migration and what Kubernetes features Veeam Kasten can enhance and integrate with Red Hat OpenShift. Due to Broadcom’s licensing changes to VMware offerings and the end-of-life to Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization, many attendees wanted to understand how Veeam Backup & Replication could help users migrate to new virtualization platforms, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. As for Kasten, we extended this discussion to include containers and OpenShift Virtualization VMs. This is because VM migration requires some modernization in order to use new Kubernetes storage and networking operations.
Veeam Announcements
Taking center stage for Veeam was our announcement of Veeam Kasten V7.0. First up, we tackled the rebranding of Kasten K10 to Veeam Kasten. This new product name emphasizes the combined power of Veeam and Kasten, the #1 Kubernetes data protection solution that leverages the global #1 backup brand. This release also brings several new features that emphasize cyber resilience and enterprise innovations.
As a Kubernetes-native application and certified Red Hat OpenShift operator, Veeam Kasten can be quickly and easily deployed in any OpenShift environment. Of particular interest to attendees were these key innovations for Red Hat environments:
- VMs and cloud-native protection with Kasten + Red Hat: VMs running on Kubernetes with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization enables VM and container workloads to exist side-by-side on Red Hat OpenShift.
- Kasten also raised the bar by introducing support for Direct API integration between Kasten and CephRBD volume manager for blockmode exports and restores.
- Kasten now supports Ceph File System (CephFS) shallow-cloned volumes. As data on Kubernetes continues to grow, performance efficiency becomes more and more crucial. With Kasten, customers no longer need to create new volumes and clone entire snapshot data. This means faster backup operations and reduced cost!
Read this blog post for the full details on Kasten’s new release and press coverage for Red Hat Summit. Also, view this recording of Gaurav Rishi, our Vice President of Product Management and Stu Miniman, Senior Director of Market Insights for Hybrid Platforms, discussing the Veeam and Kasten partnership from theCube TV studio on the tradeshow floor.
One quote from this interview perfectly captures the spirit of our innovative partnership:
“We have 450,000 customers [and] a lot of them use VMs, and that’s what we back up,” said Rishi. “One of the tenets for us has always been data freedom. Here we are as Kasten, a Kubernetes-centric product, and now we see VMs come in there [as well]. And so, right time, right place — and no better partner than Red Hat to be able to enable that.”
Veeam also spread the word about these joint innovations in several live presentations at both the Kyndryl and Red Hat booths.
Industry Trends, Themes, and Open Source News
Veeam’s field CTO, Michael Cade, and Principal of Cloud-Native Product Management, Mark Lavi, also joined Rick Vannover, Veeam Vice President of Product Strategy, for an episode of Tech Bites: Red Hat Summit edition! At this live event, they summarized top Red Hat Summit themes and discussed Veeam Kasten V7.0 in depth.
Wait, There’s More!
Be sure to explore our Red Hat Alliance page, which is full of great solution briefs, videos, and demos. A specific point of interest is this Red Hat and Veeam white paper, “Data Protection for OpenShift Virtualization with Veeam Kasten.” In it, we explain how Kasten delivers reliable backup and disaster recovery (DR) for Kubernetes. This includes how it allows VM and container workloads located on traditional infrastructures to operate consistently in modern cloud native environments.
Then, explore the world of OpenShift Virtualization. ROSA and OpenShift Operator with interactive demos and view our latest webinars on-demand , “How to Future-Proof Your Kubernetes Data” where we covered Veeam Kasten V7.0 in depth and even deeper in “Resiliency and Application Mobility for Red Hat OpenShift with Veeam Kasten V7.0”.
Lastly, take a test drive! There’s no better time than now to experience the power of Kasten. Download your free copy today! Use Kasten Free for your sandbox, on your own infrastructure, or in any cloud.
Red Hat Summit proved to be a big step forward in Veeam’s partnership with Red Hat and opened doors to many exciting opportunities. We look forward to continuing our engagement in the weeks and months ahead, and at the next Red Hat Summit!
