Increasingly automation is becoming a way of life in IT, tools that take repetitive or complex tasks and simplify them by automating much of the work they require are increasingly popular. They also have real value for many organisations, it frees up resources, improves the time of delivery and reduces risk of errors that often come when humans deliver repetitive tasks or ones they have to deliver quickly or under pressure.

One such tool is Veeam Availability Orchestrator (VAO) which provides the ability to automate the testing, documentation and invocation of a business recovery plan, a valuable resource to help simplify the very complex world of business disaster recovery. Why so valuable? If you’ve ever worked on delivering disaster recovery you’ll know why, it’s complex, hard to test, difficult to document and when it is like that in planning it also makes invocation difficult and potentially fraught with problems.

Last week at NetApp INSIGHT in Las Vegas, Veeam announced a new update to this product, version 3.0. As someone who has always been a fan of this tool and ones like it for managing such a complex process as DR, I thought it would make a good podcast, so I caught with Alec King a Vice President of Product Management at Veeam, to discuss the new release and also its first attempt to enhance a 3rd parties DR capability by integrating with NetApp’s snapshot and SnapMirror technologies.

During my chat with Alec, we discuss.

What do we mean by availability?

Why availability is more than technology

The value of orchestration

Documenting your DR

Why automation can give DR confidence

Business DR is not a technology problem it needs everyone’s input

NetApp integration and the value it brings

Improving each other’s capabilities to deliver better outcomes

Why would I consider VAO?

I really like Veeam Availability Orchestrator as a product and as someone who has sat at the sharp end of a DR plan invocation a set of tools that automated much of the process and that had given me confidence in it previously would have made life a whole lot easier.

If you want to find out more about VAO you can get a free trial of the current version here https://www.veeam.com/availability-orchestrator.html and if you are a NetApp customer and interested in trying out the new version 3.0 with its ONTAP integration you can email Orchestrator.beta@veeam.com about joining the trial program. You will also find some useful further information on VAO 3.0 via this excellent article from Melissa Wright on her blog site vmiss.net.

If you’d like to find out more about Alec you’ll get him on Linkedin.

If you would like to be a guest or have topic suggestions for the show why not drop me an email to podcast@techstringy.com.

Thanks for listening.