Back in July of this year, I attended Gestalt IT Tech Field Day in Seattle. You may recall that I was the recipient of a presentation from Veeam and wrote about their upcoming Backup & Replication product and new vPower technology.
Backup & Replication 4.0 had already been known as a category finalist at last year’s VMworld conference. Veeam was not content in the runner up position. In September, the Columbus, Reading, and Sydney based organization showcased their new development at VMworld 2010 San Francisco and walked away with Best of Show and Best New Technology. I can tell you as an attendee of the conference for several years that the competition in the Solutions Exchange is rivaled by nothing else that I’ve ever seen before. For Veeam to win as they did in these categories is a pretty big deal. I know they are both excited and proud about this year’s results.
In October, Veeam released Backup & Replication 5.0 to the public. Companies of all sizes can now leverage the technology and realize the features, efficiency, and savings Veeam brings to the table.
So what’s baked into 5.0? Veeam B&R alumni will find a significant portion of what made previous versions so great. At a high level, 2-in-1 data protection for VMware virtual infrastructure: Backup and Replication features consolidated into a single no-nonsense solution. New in version 5 you’ll find the following:
1. Instant VM Recovery: Restore an entire virtual machine from a backup file in minutes. Users remain productive while IT troubleshoots the issue.
2. U-AIR™ (Universal Application-Item Recovery): Recover individual items from any virtualized application, on any operating system, without additional backups, agents or software tools. Eliminates the need for expensive special-purpose tools and extends granular recovery to all applications and users.
3. SureBackup™ Recovery Verification: Automatically verify the recoverability of every backup, of every virtual machine, every time. Eliminates uncertainty and sets a new standard in data protection.
4. On-demand Sandbox: Create test VMs from any point in time to troubleshoot problems or test workarounds, software patches and new application code. Eliminates the need for dedicated test labs and the overhead that extra VMware snapshots place on VMs.
5. Instant File-level Recovery for any file system: Recover an entire VM or an individual file from the same image-level backup. Extends instant file-level recovery to all VMs.
Personally, I’ve been accumulating quite a bit of experience with Veeam Backup & Replication. Over the past year, I have been using it to provide various levels of protection for tiers of data in my lab which myself and my family are immensely dependent on. Last year at this time I was backing up to tape. Those with growing data sets know that the tape model isn’t sustainable long term. Not to mention, tape is a datacenter fashion faux pas, even for a lab environment I was catching hell about it in the social media streams. Now the tape library is gone, the lab is 100% virtualized and Veeam backs up all of it. Included in that figure is data which I cannot put a price on: well over a decade of my technical work, financial and tax data, and 81GB of family pictures and videos which are irreplaceable. Today, Veeam is the provider which I trust as the sole safety net between peace of mind and utter disaster. Beyond its intrinsic functionality, I used Veeam Backup & Replication as a solution in my VCDX design submission and successfully defended it last February. Assuming it fits the business requirements and design constraints, it’s a solid choice in a VMware virtualized datacenter.
As I said before, version 5 is currently shipping. List price starts at $599 USD per socket for Standard Edition and $899 USD per socket for Enterprise Edition. If you’ve been carrying B&R maintenance as of 6/30/10, you’re already eligible for a free upgrade to Enterprise Edition.
If that weren’t enough to tantalize your tentacles, Veeam is honoring a Competitive Upgrade program through 12/24/10. New customers receive a 25% discount on the price of Standard or Enterprise Edition with proof of purchase of another backup product.
Download a free 30-day trial of Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0 here.
For those of us that haven’t abandoned tape just yet and use it to offsite Veeam backups, the ability to create ‘traditional’ incremental backup files instead of reverse incrementals+updating the synthetic full every day is also a nice touch.
Data Center Infrastructure Group (www.dciginc.com) and SMB Research (www.smbresearch.net) will soon be releasing our Virtual Server Backup Software Buyers Guide looking at this and other solutions. For more information, visit http://www.dciginc.com or http://smbresearch.net/blog/backupsoftwarepreview/.
Jason,
Thanks for “tantalizing tentacles” about Veeam Backup & Replication. 🙂