Quoting Enterprise IT Planet 

“Double surgeries.” That’s the predicament of many companies transitioning to a virtualized environment, according to Veeam, a start-up focused on helping these enterprises manage the new realities of their VMware-based virtual environments.

The first surgery is the switchover itself, with all that entails of downsizing server environments and load balancing applications. The second comes when they start trying to write manual scripts to support these new infrastructures, which becomes even more untenable as they scale them up.

The leading virtualization platform provider, VMware, is increasingly building tools into its environment to address issues like backup and patch management, but Veeam argues that the vendor on its own can’t hit or master all the hot spots, including making it easy for administrators, and server and data center managers to manage discovering and configuring.large virtual environments.

“VMware has to provide the basic plumbing and infrastructure, and they have to compete with Microsoft and other virtual platform providers,” says Ratmir Timashev, president, CEO and co-founder of Veeam. “So they don’t have time to think about things that maybe aren’t critical for them to win the marketplace, but they are important.”

The founders of Veeam—Timashev and his partner, CTO and co-founder Andrei Baronov—are betting that’s leaving them room to replicate the success they both had with the previous company they founded, Aelita Software. Aelita provided Windows NT and Microsoft infrastructure systems management tools, managing about 5 million Windows NT to Active Directory users before it was sold to Quest Software for $150 million in 2004. As it did with Microsoft, Veeam says it is working with VMware as a partner rather than a competitor.

“There will be opportunities because the market is so fast moving, so VMware has no chance to cover all the customer needs,” Timashev says.

The first commercial fruits of their efforts have been Veeam Configurator, a deployment planning and troubleshooting tool, and Veeam Reporter, for discovering, documenting and analyzing virtualized environments. But it’s been seeding the market with a free product, FastSCP, for basic file management of virtual systems, which has so far been downloaded close to 12,000 times since it was released in October, the company says.

“Our goal is to build relationships with x86 administrators so they love our tools,” says Timashev.

It’s planning to also shortly release a product designed for backing up virtual environments. After server consolidation, back up ranks high on organizations’ reasons for going virtual, but, says Timashev, it has to get much better for people to start using virtualization for the purposes of high availability and quick recovery.

Datastor Ltd., VMware’s official distributor in New Zealand and a VMware Accredited Consultancy with a professional services arm, is using Veeam’s Reporter and FastSCP tools in its customer engagements.

“The amount of time it takes to complete some of the mundane tasks associated with implementing a virtualization solution continually leads us to investigate potential solutions that will speed up our delivery timeframes without sacrificing the quality of our solutions,” says technical services manager Otto le Roux. The Veeam toolsets, he says, allows Datastor to automate various cumbersome tasks and cuts down on implementation time frames.

Another challenge Veeam says companies are in for is monitoring chargebacks for the applications and the resources they consume running on virtual servers.

“We hear about chargebacks in just about every call that we do,” says George Sidoris, VP of sales. “These are some of the largest organizations in the world, and they are going to be faced with that.”

The company acknowledges that the market for virtualization management tools is a crowded one. There are hundreds of vendors, from small start-ups to well-established names in the systems management sector, interested in a piece of the pie. Veeam contends that many of the established names may be supporting virtualization in their tool-sets, but haven’t made the transition to really thinking about development from the standpoint of a virtual world.

“You have to change your mentality,” says Timashev. “it will be difficult for the physical systems management vendors to really understand this. Our difference is we will be native virtualization.” As for start-ups with similar goals, “we invite and respect good competition from the virtual world,” he says.

Read the original, here.