Veeam has added support for IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris operating systems to its availability solution portfolio in a move which extends the vendor's availability platform to Unix workloads.

Support for the AIX and Solaris operating systems will be available in the first half of 2018, with the support based on technology developed by Cristie Software.

Nathan Steiner, Veeam Software ANZ head of systems engineering, says AIX and Solaris still form a ‘significant' part of mission and business critical services for enterprises across Australia and New Zealand, many of which have large, complex and multifaceted infrastructures, systems and applications.

His views are backed by Phil Goodwin, IDC research director, who notes that while x86 virtualisation runs the majority of workloads, many enterprises still have mission critical applications running in AIX and Solaris platforms.

“Now that Veeam supports these platforms in Veeam Availability Platform, IT organisations can protect the vast majority of their applications all under the Veeam umbrella using consistent policies and processes,” Goodwin says.

Steiner dubs the announcement ‘major' saying it ‘continues to allow Veeam to be a strategic partner for enterprises undertaking business transformation towards an interconnected and digital ecosystem'.

Peter McKay, Veeam co-chief executive and president, says the addition of AIX and Solaris support helps further Veeam's strategy of extending its leadership position in VMware and Hyper-V to deliver availability for any app, any data, on any cloud.

“Enterprises need to enhance business efficiency and security, while embracing the cloud, but many mission-critical databases and applications are still running, and will continue to run, on AIX and Solaris,” McKay says.

“As we expand the Veeam Availability Platform to meet the needs of our growing enterprise customer base, we are pleased to extend support for physical workloads in these environments, in addition to Windows and Linux.

“Enterprise customers can now replace legacy backup solutions with a single comprehensive data protection and availability solution from Veeam,” McKay says.