Kasten by Veeam

1. Summary

Kasten, now a part of Veeam, has developed one of the most innovative Kubernetes-native data protection solutions on the market. It now adds cloud-native data management to enable solutions that simplify application and data mobility, migrations, security, and development processes.

Kasten K10 has four key characteristics:

• Cloud-Native and Purpose-Built: K10 is specifically architected to work in Kubernetes environments with the latest microservices development strategies. K10 allocates only the necessary resources to perform a requested operation and automatically scales up or down based on the job at hand. It takes advantage of several optimization techniques to improve overall data protection efficiency.
• Application-Focused: Unlike traditional monolithic and VM-based environments, modern applications based on containers are organized as microservices. To protect this type of application it is necessary to understand the application, its running state, its configuration, its desired state, and the surrounding environment. Kasten excels in this area, giving users the tools to identify applications and the information to protect them correctly.
• Environmentally Aware: Kasten has the functionality to understand all the components of an application and take the necessary steps to protect databases and other data services in a consistent manner, without losing any data or transactions. K10 is also well integrated with the infrastructure. By having a full picture of the underlying hardware, the product can overcome limitations of the abstraction layers, such as the CSI, and perform operations faster and more efficiently.
• Easy to Use: Though many Kubernetes users prefer command-line interfaces and APIs to interact with tools and applications, Kasten also offers a very well-designed interface. This makes the product more user friendly—and closer to the way most enterprise data center system administrators work. This simplifies product adoption in large organizations across teams dedicated to different functions. This is especially important given the recently previewed integration with Veeam core products, which makes the product more appealing to a wide range of users.

K10’s focus on multi-cloud, multi-tenant, and multi-cluster management features lends itself well to large enterprise deployments. But the key characteristics described above, and the friendly licensing policies, are helping Kasten to find enthusiastic adopters in smaller organizations as well. Furthermore, a free, fully featured version of the product is available for small environments that don’t need enterprise support. This gives users a chance to evaluate and adopt the product in non-business-critical situations.

Table 1: Market Segment, Architecture, and Deployment Model Scoring