Veeam Acquires Kasten to Protect Kubernetes Data

Veeam Software announced today it has acquired Kasten for $150 million in cash as part of an effort to add a data protection platform for Kubernetes to its broader portfolio.

Kasten CEO Niraj Tolia says under the terms of the deal Kasten will operate as a unit of Veeam with both organizations working toward enabling the Kasten platform to be managed from with the Veeam console. That approach will enable IT organizations that need to manage multiple platforms alongside Kubernetes with a means to protect data in a unified manner, he says.

Veeam CTO Danny Allan says acquiring Kasten provides Veeam with an offering that addresses the data protection requirements of a Kubernetes platform that increasingly runs stateful applications that need to be protected. The Kasten approach to addressing that issue is more application-centric and ties directly into Kubernetes application programming interfaces (APIs), notes Allan.

Kasten also provides Veeam with a data protection platform that appeals more to DevOps teams than to storage administrators, who rely on graphical tools to back up and recover data on virtual machine platforms such as VMware vSphere, notes Allan. Even though the bulk of Kubernetes clusters are deployed on virtual machines, DevOps teams are now incorporating backup and recovery within their workflows. Those teams prefer tools that are a natural extension of the workflow, he says.

Finally, Allan says Veeam was impressed by Kasten’s go-to-market strategy, which makes the platform available for free for up to 10 Kubernetes nodes.

As part of their integration efforts, both companies will be working toward providing a “bridge” that will make Kubernetes more accessible to traditional administrators of virtual machine platforms, Tolia says. Veeam currently has more than 300,000 IT organizations relying on its platform, many of which will eventually need to find a way to protect data residing on Kubernetes clusters.

Tolia says with the rise of stateful applications on Kubernetes clusters, a philosophical shift is now underway in the enterprise. Initially, much of the focus regarding containers and Kubernetes has been on stateless applications, which are viewed as being comparatively low-risk because they don’t access persistent storage. In the last year, however, IT teams have become a lot more comfortable using the same Kubernetes platform to deploy both stateless and stateful applications in ways that scale up and down more efficiently, he notes.

In many cases, data protection will eventually become part of a set of best DevSecOps practices that would enable actions such as a backup to automatically occur anytime a ransomware attack was detected, for example.

It won’t be long before other major providers of data protection platforms expand their initiatives to support Kubernetes clusters. The challenge many of them are encountering is there is no classic storage administrator in Kubernetes environments, as they tend to be managed using command-line interfaces (CLIs), which are preferred by DevOps teams.