Veeam is all set to fully launch version 13 of its Veeam Data Platform (VDP) – the platform upon which Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) runs – by the end of 2025. Last week, at its annual VeeamON event in San Diego, it took the opportunity to showcase some key features.
Among these was the Veeam Software Appliance, which will bring Veeam Backup & Replication software pre-configured on a Linux server.
Running on Linux brings two advantages. First, it will perform well because the Linux in question – “Just Enough OS” (JeOS) – has shed all excess functionality not needed in a backup solution. Second, running on Linux makes it extra resilient to much malware, which tends to target Windows.
For example, when French company Manutan was attacked by ransomware in 2021, its Veeam software protected enterprise data, but recovery was hampered because the Windows servers on which it ran had been attacked. Since then, Veeam has worked to avoid such a scenario, and running its software on Linux is likely a response to this.
Also announced was that Veeam and Scality will team up to provide a backup appliance based on the latter’s Artesca backup-focused object storage.
MCP API to bring RAG from backups
Also to come in VDP 13 is support for model context protocol (MCP), which allows backups to be connected to a large language model (LLM) to help enrich the knowledge base it can work from.
“It acts to provide RAG [retrieval augmented generation] functionality from backups,” said Christophe Fontaine, technical director for Veeam in southern Europe and Africa. “That’s really useful because backups contain all an enterprise’s data, including what is no longer in production. Also, our management console Veeam ONE is capable of classifying such data, to avoid delivering sensitive data to AI [artificial intelligence], for example.”
Version 13 of VDP proposes an application programming interface (API) for MCP in addition to data classification. Veeam hasn’t said anything about the conversion of backup data to a vector format understandable by an LLM. This requires serious compute power and extra storage.
Veeam already has an AI chatbot interface that can write reports on the state of backups and respond to questions formulated in natural language. The chatbot can search backup data more or less deeply to discover, for example, whether there is sensitive data or data that’s been infected by malware.
The depth to which that chatbot can search and analyse will depend on what the customer pays. VDP runs on-site and is invoiced monthly to various service levels – Foundation, Advanced, Premium – that bring differing levels of functionality. For example, data classification is only accessible by Premium customers.
Veeam Data Cloud to back up Entra ID and Salesforce
At this moment, it’s not clear whether support for MCP will arrive in VDP 13 at the outset or if it will be initially available on Veeam Data Cloud (VDC), the company’s cloud services platform.
VDC is a version of VBR that runs in the Microsoft Azure cloud and protects data in the Azure cloud, and storage there too. The key difference with products that run on-site is that in the cloud, Veeam takes care of backups, storage and ensuring software is kept up to date, whereas on-site customers need to provide their own on-site target storage or cloud storage as a target.
While VDC includes the basic functions of VBR in backing up Windows or Linux virtual machines (VMs), it differs from the on-site VBR suite. Here, that includes the possibility of backing up data and configurations for Office 365, as with other software-as-a-service applications on Azure. That will now also include backups for Microsoft Entra ID – the replacement for Active Directory – as well as Salesforce deployments.
Also in VDC, and already in VDP, is Vault, which allows for immutable backups from which Windows or Linux servers can be restored in less than five minutes.
VDP on VDC in 2026
We will have to wait until 2026 for VDC to have all the functionality of VDP, when the online versions of options available on-site will be grouped under a service called “VDP on VDC”.
Also, it is the case that VBR and VDP can export backups to clouds other than Microsoft, but VDC runs exclusively on Azure.
VDC was created from the need to back up Microsoft 365 data and was initially built from the dedicated Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 (VBM) in 2022. According to Veeam, the colossal success of this service – with more than 23 million users to date – was a key driver in Veeam’s offer of multiple online Microsoft-focused services. In February, Microsoft announced it would invest in Veeam, with an undisclosed amount.
Veeam claims 550,000 customers and has reported an annual revenue of $1.75bn. It is number one among backup software providers, of Microsoft 365 and in Kubernetes backup, according to IDC and Gartner.
