By now, most folks in the Veeam community should be aware of Object First. But if you’ve been living under a virtual rock, Object First that is a company that came out of secrecy mode less than two years ago at VeeamON 2022 in Las Vegas. Co-founded by the co-founders of Veeam, Object First has developed the Ootbi, or the “Out of the box immutability” immutability appliance. It’s a SuperMicro server running a hardened Ubuntu linux OS that creates a turn-key S3 compatible object storage appliance that can be placed in your datacenter that has immutability built-in without the need to deploy a Veeam Hardened Repository manually and takes advantage of object storage. Sizing starts out at 64TB, but 128TB appliances are also available, and you can cluster up to 4 appliances as well.

The below video actually does a great job of explaining just what Ootbi is.

Object First was gracious enough to send me one of the 64TB Ootbi’s as a demo/testing unit for a few months. While, I don’t have a ton of SuperMicro experience, it doesn’t really matter as it’s a pretty simple device that’s easy to deploy. I have already racked it up in my Omaha datacenter and have already started backing up some VM’s using direct to object backups, but plan also also using direct copy to object and generally just playing around with the device. I also have some clients in mind that can benefit from immutable backups in the datacenter. This is especially useful for one of those which doesn’t really want to utilize object storage in the cloud and actually has their network segmented away from the internet because they are a manufacturing facility.

One of Ootbi’s claims to fame is 15 minutes from box to backup. Can it be done in 15 minutes? I’ll put this to the test, and poke at things to see the good, the bad, and if it exists, the ugly.