Backup software vendor Nakivo has added cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft 365, support for backups for Proxmox virtualization environments, and the cloud as a target for NAS backups in the latest release – version 11 – of its backup and replication product.
Supporting data protection in Microsoft 365 environments brings Nakivo in line with many backup vendors that protect data in major cloud services. Here, they take advantage of the fact that hyperscale cloud providers do little more than rudimentary protection of customer data.
“Microsoft’s business model is that you’re responsible for your data and they’re responsible for their infrastructure,” said Sergey Serdyuk, vice president of product management at Nakivu. “So, if you accidentally delete something, you’re responsible.” What we’ve launched allows customers to put their data in A place from which they can be retrieved and they can create a repository wherever they want.
This expands Nakivo’s cloud backup capabilities from existing EC2 support. Serdiuk said other cloud platforms would be added, but did not say when.
Meanwhile, Nakivo has added support for agentless backups in the open source Proxmox virtualization environment. According to Serdiuk, about a third (33%) of its customers – mostly small and medium-sized businesses – who responded to an internal survey said they plan to move to Proxmox and Away from VMware.
The background to this is Broadcom’s purchase of VMware Subsequent changes in licenses and higher reported costs, Serdiuk said.
“Broadcom acquired VMware and changed the licensing model from perpetual to subscription,” Serdiuk said. “Customers have reported increased costs as a result, and many are looking elsewhere. Proxmox is free, or comes with inexpensive support, and is suitable for SMBs. As a virtualization platform, it can replace VMware. We are also seeing a smaller percentage migrating to Nutanix and Hyper-V .
Veeam, a prominent backup product maker that made its name providing backup for VMware, began offering Proxmox over the summer, in a move seen as a key moment for those considering moving away from VMware. The move is seen as potentially opening the way for migration to Proxmox as it removes the guardrail of those environments.
Nakivo has also added backup of NAS devices to cloud targets. According to Serdiuk, this necessitated the company developing a way to make file data suitable for S3 storage.
“Most cloud vendors claim S3 compatibility [for file data]”, but some modifications were needed to work with the API.” “So, there was some fine-tuning working with file data – block data is easier – because when we copy file data to S3, the entire file has to be converted to work in the cloud.”
Release 11 also saw the addition of NetApp Storage Snapshots for FAS and AFF arrays to allow customers to backup VMware VMs on these machines from storage snapshots. The unified warehouse capability allows customers to create a scalable storage pool from multiple locations, with failover to usable capacity elsewhere if the first choice storage in the pool fails.
Nakivo now offers a tenant overview dashboard for service provider customers that allows them to manage tenant activity, performance metrics, and resources from a single screen.
Nakivo was founded in 2012 and began specializing in virtual machine backup. Version 1.0 introduces VMware support and installation on Windows.
It now supports workloads in VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, Windows, Linux, and in the cloud in Amazon EC2 and Microsoft 365.
It supports use cases ranging from SMBs to large enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs), with the ability to deploy on NAS, Windows and Linux, as well as in a virtual machine or from an Amazon instance in the cloud. It can recover with resolutions ranging from individual files to entire sites.
Version 10.9 of the Backup and Copy software has added scanning for ransomware malware, as well as bare metal recovery and recovery from tape directly to the virtual machine (VM).
