Nakivo takes aims at VMware refugees tempted by Proxmox

Backup software vendor Nakivo has added Microsoft 365 cloud-to-cloud backup, support for backups of Proxmox virtualisation environments, and cloud as a target for NAS backups in the latest version – v11 – of its Backup & Replication product.

Support for data protection of Microsoft 365 environments brings Nakivo into line with numerous backup suppliers that protect data in the main cloud services. Here, they are capitalising on the fact that the hyperscaler cloud providers do no more than rudimentary protection of customer data.

Sergei Serdyuk, product management vice-president at Nakivo, said: “Microsoft’s business model is that you are responsible for your data and they are responsible for their infrastructure. So, if you accidentally delete something, you are responsible. What we have launched allows customers to put their data somewhere it can be recovered from and they can set up a repository where they want.”

This extends Nakivo’s cloud backup capabilities from its existing EC2 support. Serdyuk said other cloud platforms would be added, but would not say when.

Meanwhile, Nakivo added support for agentless backups in the open source Proxmox virtualisation environment. According to Serdyuk, around one third (33%) of its customers – mostly small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – who responded to an internal survey said that they planned to migrate to Proxmox and away from VMware.

The background to this is the Broadcom purchase of VMware and subsequent licensing changes and reported cost rises, said Serdyuk.

“Broadcom acquired VMware and changed the licensing model from perpetual to subscription,” said Serdyuk. “Customers have reported increased costs as a result and so many are looking elsewhere. Proxmox is free, or comes with inexpensive support, and is suited to SMEs. As a virtualisation platform, it can displace VMware. We also see a smaller percentage migrate to Nutanix and Hyper-V.”

Prominent backup product maker Veeam – which made its name providing backup for VMware – started to offer Proxmox during the summer, in a move seen as a key moment for those considering moving away from VMware. That move is seen as potentially unlocking migration to Proxmox because it removes the barrier to protecting those environments.

Nakivo has also added backup of NAS devices to cloud targets. According to Serdyuk, 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 there have needed to be some tweaks to work with the API,” he said. “So, there has been some fine-tuning to work with file data – block data is easier – because when we copy file data to S3, the whole file needs to be transformed to work in the cloud.”

Version 11 also saw the addition of backup from NetApp Storage Snapshots for FAS and AFF arrays to allow customers to backup VMware VMs on these devices from storage snapshots. Federated repository capability allows customers to create a scalable storage pool from multiple locations, with failover to useable capacity elsewhere should first choice storage in the pool fail.

Nakivo now offers a tenant overview dashboard for service provider customers that allows them to manage tenant activity, performance and resource metrics from a single screen.

Nakivo was founded in 2012 and started out by specialising in VM backup. Its version 1.0 offered VMware support and installation on Windows.

It now supports workloads in VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, Windows and Linux, and in the cloud in Amazon EC2 and Microsoft 365.

It supports use cases that range from SMEs, to large enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs), with deployment possible on NAS, Windows and Linux, as well as in a virtual appliance or from an Amazon instance in the cloud. It can restore with granularity that ranges from single files to entire sites.

Version 10.9 of Backup & Replication software added ransomware malware scanning, as well as bare metal recovery and recovery from tape directly to virtual machine (VM).