Evolution is a beautiful thing. We see it daily in our personal lives, family, friends, and nature. What’s interesting is that things also evolve when we look at the IT sector and, more specifically, data storage. However, it’s not evolution that creates and shifts markets — it’s a revolution.

Revolution creates the opportunity to change a market. Every 10 to 15 years, the incumbent #1 technology provider in a given segment probably isn’t #1 anymore! And that is great for innovation and customers!

So why does this matter now?

Several years ago, with my business partner Andrei Baronov, we looked into the future of modern data protection, data management, and data security.

Part of that look into the future was the thesis that object storage would change the face of the data world — a change that could revolutionize the market. And with that, Object First was born — an idea that would lead to creating the best backup storage explicitly designed for Veeam using object storage.

It’s no secret that more data needs protection — and that data is more critical than ever. Data protection used to be a director- or VP-level decision, but with the exponential rise of ransomware, data protection has become a C-level or board-level discussion for every business, large or small. Backup storage was easier to solve in the past and didn’t require top performance or heightened security. It is exponentially more difficult to meet business requirements for data protection today, and IT organizations expect their data to be protected and instantly recoverable.

So, we saw an opportunity to create a new market. Businesses — especially midsize enterprises—need a simple and scalable ransomware-proof solution with powerful performance that can run production environments from backup storage for disaster recovery and is affordable enough to fit into shrinking budget envelopes. These are the foundational roots of Object First.

First, let me explain how we see the data world from a technology perspective. There are two distinct technology layers: the data management layer (backup, recovery, and data orchestration) and the storage layer, where the data will live perpetually. Veeam is arguably the best data management platform, but because Veeam is software-defined and software only, Veeam has always relied on its storage partners to deliver the hardware storage layer. As a result, Veeam has the largest ecosystem of storage partners and remains the best data management solution.

On the other hand, we also believe that object storage is ideal for backup data because it has inherent advantages such as scalability, availability, reliability, security, and immutability. In addition, it benefits from having a much lower cost for large data volumes. No wonder it is the defacto storage choice for all the public cloud services such as AWS and Azure.

So, object storage has immense potential for backup and recovery.

However, current on-prem object storage solutions on the market are optimized for a different use case: specifically distributed, large-scale Kubernetes enterprise applications. We saw the opportunity to make object storage the first-class citizen for backup. In other words, we saw the opportunity to create an object storage solution designed specifically for the backup use case and, more specifically, for Veeam.

With Object First, we developed a purpose-built object storage backup appliance for midsize enterprises with constrained IT. The physical appliance provides the best defense against ransomware with effortless immutability right out of the box. Object First is a simple, powerful, affordable solution that can easily scale up to 0.5 petabytes.

I firmly believe object storage is the future of backup. When you need more backup capacity, think about object storage first.

And when you think about Veeam, think about Object First!

3 Reasons Object First Is Best For Veeam