We all know the saying ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’… but in the case of VeeamON this year, which was scheduled to kick off in Las Vegas back in May 2020, perhaps a more appropriate saying would be ‘what doesn’t happen in Vegas, happens online’! 

Nobody will be surprised to read that the Las Vegas VeeamON was cancelled this year, like so many other great events for 2020.  But the Veeam team’s dedication to still bringing their partners and clients together for learning, networking, and fun certainly surprised Shane Jameson, Cloud Plus Systems Engineering Team Leader and Veeam Certified Engineer. Shane attended the virtual VeeamOn conference for 2020 and reported back on his experience.

VeeamON 2020 was set to be my fourth VeeamON conference, and the opportunity to increase my knowledge on the Veeam products and liaise with so many like-minded people has become a real highlight in my calendar.  Like so many people, I was disappointed that the conference had to be cancelled this year, and dubious that an online version could be anywhere near as good!  However, I should have known that if anyone could perfect a virtual event, it would be the people at Veeam.

With a jam-packed 2-day conference agenda that included breakout sessions, live demonstrations for each time zone region and deep-dives into interesting features and scenarios, the educational content of the conference formed the basis of success.  I always enjoy hearing about the new features being released, so this year one of the highlights from my perspective was demonstrations of the Veeam Availability Suite V11.  Veeam CDP (Continuous Data Protection) is coming in the next couple of months and is going to provide the ultimate solution for rapid recovery with minimal data loss – with no workload dependency, no hardware dependency and no extra cost!  I was impressed that this feature is simple to use and that these capabilities are all available in a single product.

As usual with Veeam, there are constant improvements to the Scale-Out Backup Repository, and before the end of this year, we will be seeing a new Archive Tier which will provide longer term retention in the public cloud, as well as Google Cloud Storage capability.  The latter is not something we’ve had queries about but it shows the dedication of Veeam to support object storage and really offer solutions for every industry and vertical market.

Most impressive was the Instant Recovery developments, including instant publishing of NAS backup content as a file share, instant recovery of ANY backup to Microsoft Hyper-V as well as instant recovery of Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases, which will be the first of its kind on the market.

To top it all off, there was mention of an upcoming Veeam agent for MAC, which will hopefully be released alongside Veeam Backup and Replication V11.

With all of this information being a little overwhelming, I was grateful that the VeeamON organisers hadn’t forgotten the other important aspects of the conference – fun!

The conference website was set up with chat features that allowed attendees of each presentation to chat amongst themselves, as well as the ability to chat with individuals or groups of peers at any time.  I was able to book meetings with the sponsors in the trade expo ‘area’ and take part in quizzes and games that also taught me a few extra bits of Veeam information along the way.  The customary Veeam t-shirt was available to everyone who registered and is winging its way to me as I type.

For on-demand light relief there was a live ‘puppy cam’ available to attendees, which streamed cute Labrador puppies straight from the kennels at Guide Dogs America.  Veeam did a great job of promoting this organisation and I hope they got a few donations from some happy conference goers, especially after the live concert from Keith Urban on Friday morning Australian time (the only part of the conference that wasn’t time zone adjusted).

(Photo credit @PaulCrocettiTT)

 

I will look forward to being at this conference ‘live and in person’ again sometime in the future, but I was very impressed with the professional virtual experience provided by Veeam this year and I know Cloud Plus is proud to be associated with such an innovative and dedicated company.