Report on Veritas Vision 2017

The annual user conference – Veritas Vision 2017 – just took place in Las Vegas, NV, at the Aria complex with 2,000 attendees representing 52 countries for at least 33 official sponsors and exhibitors.

As a believer of cloud with a clear multi-cloud strategy, Veritas was selected by top four sponsors – Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle – who lead the cloud computing industry with AWS, present last year but absent for this edition.

Among other sponsors we noticed the presence of Aptare, Cloudian, Infinidat, NEC, NetApp and Seagate and also Komprise and StorReduce in the Google Cloud both with small pods, allowing them to gain visibility.

The company has articulated the conference around four topics that describe its products and solutions: data protection, software-defined storage (SDS), cloud and risk & compliance, articulated around the 360 Data Management Platform (360DM).

Data Protection
NetBackup, the unified enterprise data protection offering for multi-cloud, physical and virtual environments, will be available under 8.1 release on September 26. Still available as software or appliance, the company adds several features:

• CloudCatalyst, available as software or appliance, offers a new deduplication mechanism connected clouds,
• Parallel Streaming to support NoSQL, Hadoop and Cassandra environments, crystalizing new users’ needs validated by players such DatosIO or Imanis Data.
• and a comprehensive and extended support for Microsoft Azure, OneDrive for Business, SQL Server, Office 365, Exchange but also Google Drive and Cloud Storage, Oracle databases, Box…

SDS
Long time leader in SDS, Veritas continues to expand the product family and prefer to use SDS for block, file or object to qualify its offerings. Hopefully Veritas doesn’t use the ridiculous term Server SAN that finally creates confusion and complexity in users mind.

Veritas unveiled other key announcements:

• an object storage (SDS for Object) represented by Veritas Cloud Storage,
• a new iteration of Scale-out NAS (SDS for File) named Access Appliance powered by Seagate, available early 2018. Access is also available as pure software,
• and HyperScale for Container (SDS for Block) as the new companion of HyperScale for OpenStack.

Cloud
Information Map receives 23 new connectors for data sources for on-premises and cloud-based environments. It is also available as a standalone product.

The company has also gave some previews of the next big thing at Veritas, the Multi-Cloud Data Management platform, that will impact and weaken many tentatives from small vendors.

Risk and Compliance
Among other topics, GDPR was covered in various places and several extensions and new features for Enterprise Vault were introduced.

Microsoft
Microsoft and especially its Azure business were also covered during the show. Veritas announced 360DM for Azure but also Veritas Resiliency Platform (VRP), SDS Access, Information Map again, NetBackup (see above), Backup Exec and Enterprise Vault.

The company introduced two needs products:

• CloudPoint to manage snapshot on-prem and make quick recovery a reality in the cloud. The product is available via a freemium model.
• CloudMobility to migrate workload to and from the cloud.

This second edition of Veritas Vision, as an independent company, has confirmed that the storage software giant is back, leading the data management market with several product lines.