We’ve just become a Veeam Technology Alliance Partner, our first such alliance, but with so many choices available, why Veeam first, and why now?

This week we announced that SoftIron has become a Veeam Technology Alliance Partner. More specifically we have become “Veeam Ready” in the categories of “Object” and “Object with Immutability”. We’ll talk about what that means a little more later and provide a couple of links for more of a deep dive, but I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about why we chose to partner with Veeam as our first major alliance, and why now was the perfect time for us to do so.

Addressing Real-World Issues

First and foremost our focus has been on identifying real-world issues where partnering could really assist in providing an enhanced solution for our customers. As we spoke with customers and prospective customers we identified a desire to build a backup and recovery architecture that was able to store data locally on-premises, but also to place a copy of that data remotely in the public cloud – protected by immutability – the ability to lock a copy of the data to prevent it from being modified and so protect the organization from attacks such as ransomware.

At the same time, many have been turning to software-defined architectures to provide a unified, tiered and flexible storage platform on which to build performance as well as backup tiers of storage, alongside supporting applications requiring file, block and object storage.

Shared Values

Second, it was important for us that we partnered with an organization that shared similar values to our own. SoftIron is driven by making open source-based, software-defined data center architectures more easily deployable at scale. Our task-specific appliance approach is a key part of that, enabling us to tackle deployment and performance issues more directly than is possible just in software.

Veeam’s three core values are simplicity, reliability and flexibility – a perfect complement to our own approach.

We’re already engaged and working with the Veeam field and Alliance team along with their channel partners, solving customer problems in multiple geographies around the world, and are excited by the warmth of the welcome that we are experiencing “on the ground”. What a great team!

Offering Something Unique

Lastly, being just another “approved” partner was of little interest to us if we weren’t able to bring something unique to the table. We believe that our unique task-specific approach to open-source sets us apart from any other way of deploying Veeam backup and replication on-premises or as part of a hybrid cloud-based deployment, offering the easiest way to deploy Ceph as the underlying architecture, delivering excellent performance (as detailed in our Veeam Ready testing), but also with the flexibility to extend that storage architecture to many different use cases.

If you’d like to find out more about our technology alliance with Veeam, check out our Solutions Brief, or get in touch to discuss the issues you are grappling with. We’ll be happy to help.