Veeam Data Platform Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

IT Manager with 51-200 employees

Mar 11, 2014

Back up to remote location & ability to handle replication across WAN links are worth their weight in gold

Before I get rolling on this post let me just say this … I love Veeam

I am unapologetic about it, I think Veeam is one of the best applications to come down the pike in a long, long time. And, no, I’m not a Veeam employee, just a very enthusiastic user of the product! OK, now for the meat and potatoes …

One thing we (itgroove) get asked about, a lot, is remote backup. I’ll be honest, to this point in time I have not come across any remote backup system that I can heartily endorse to any customer. Yes, there are a lot of remote backup services out there – some better than others – but they all tend to leave me a bit cold as they usually fall down horribly when it comes to quick recovery. Worse, they usually end up costing way more than most people bargain for. We have also tried things like replicating backup devices (we tried using the RSYNC functions built into QNAP’s, as an example) with less than satisfactory results. Frankly, I was beginning to despair of finding a system that I could trust to recommend to customers, then along came Veeam …

I’ve already waxed poetic about Veeam’s abilities in other posts so I’m going to focus on it’s abilities to both back up to a remote location across WAN links as well as handle replication across WAN links in this post. I believe that these capabilities are worth their weight in gold, specially so to SMB’s that usually don’t have the financial resources to do all the things they should in terms of backup and DR.

With the latest release of Veeam, Veeam v7, the remote backup/replication abilities have been further enhanced over the already very capable abilities of v6. The big addition is the built-in “WAN accelerator” feature available with the Enterprise Plus editions of Veeam. The WAN accelerator feature can provide some fairly impressive reductions in overall bandwidth use for both remote backup and replication as the acceleration is “tuned” specifically for these processes as opposed to general hardware appliance-based WAN accelerators that have to cope with many traffic types. The other big feature in v7 (in my opinion) is the ability to “seed” both remote replication and remote backups with full backups from your main Veeam site. This alone provides a massive jump on the WAN data bandwidth reduction side of things as you can “sneaker net” large amounts of seed data out to your remote site then let Veeam syncronize backups going forward using the seed data to start.

We have two projects underway with two different customers that will leverage these abilities and I’ll be blogging about their progress and results. I think both are of interest to SMB’s as they are both real-life cases that are applicable to many small organizations.

Project A is a project to create a reliable off site backup using Veeam to process backups of a single VMware ESXi 5.1 host and two Windows Server 2008 R2 VM’s. Veeam is currently performing on-site backups of the host with output going to a local, on-site QNAP. The remote backup process will create a second Veeam backup stream via a remote Windows 7 Veeam proxy with the backup data being streamed out to a second QNAP at the remote site. In this particular case the main site and the remote site are both using Shaw as the ISP and both sites have Sonicwall firewalls so the Veeam data is being routed over a Sonicwall site-to-site VPN link. I’ll be blogging the details in a followup post titled Veeam Backup – Project A. The overall goal is to meet the Veeam “3-2-1” backup recommendations and to have reliable backup data living in two separate locations on separate media and eliminate the need to have offsite data having to be copied to USB media and manually taken off site AND keep the costs down to a manageable level.

Project B is a project to create a “poor man’s” DR site for a customer where a critical subset of their systems is to be replicated and available on “hot standby” in case of disaster at their main operations site. I use the term “poor man’s” DR as this site is being put together on a shoe-string budget due to the nature of the customer’s finances. I’m not necessarily advocating for everyone to do something similar but it will serve to illustrate what can be done with a bit of effort and thinking even if the budget is not forthcoming. In this particular case we are repurposing some old servers the customer had along with a “found” SAN that another customer was decommissioning. While the SAN is a nice thing to have there is no reason at all why something like a multi-bay QNAP or other low-cost NAS could not be used in its place. The big enabler, here, is Veeam Enterprise Plus with the WAN accelerator. The customer’s main site has two largish VMware ESXi 5.1 hosts with multiple VM’s on each host as well as a physical SQLserver host that backends their main LOB app. The SQLserver is backed up by BackupExec and there is a weekly backup job that outputs a full VM of the server. We are hoping to incorporate that backup VM into the overall Veeam process. This one is going to be very interesting; I’ll be posting about it as Veeam Replication – Project B. As with Project A, both sites use Shaw as the ISP and both sites have Sonicwall’s and we’ll be leveraging Sonicwall site-to-site VPN connections.

So, I hope you’ll keep an eye for my updates and come along for the ride. This should be very educational, I know I’m going to learn a bunch, I hope you will, too!

Disclaimer: My company is partners with several vendors including Veeam.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Carlos Arriaga

Technical Manager at GRUPO LOGON, S.A. DE C.V.

Apr 26, 2023

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Helps us understand the infrastructure more by sharing performance insights

Pros and Cons

"The solution's customer service is good."

"Its reporting feature could be better."

What is most valuable?

The solution helps us understand the infrastructure more and gives insights to develop further business plans.

What needs improvement?

The solution's reporting feature could be better. They should provide more insightful reports.

How are customer service and support?

The solution's customer service is good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

What other advice do I have?

I rate the solution as an eight. It is good but not an essential product.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner

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TimGingell

Virtual Infrastructure at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jun 26, 2022

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Robust monitoring, easy setup, and does everything I need it to

Pros and Cons

"I think Veeam ONE is great as it is, it does everything I need."

"Perhaps the interface could be improved, though it has always been fine for me."

What is our primary use case?

I primarily use the solution for monitoring.

What is most valuable?

I think Veeam ONE is great as it is, it does everything I need.

What needs improvement?

Perhaps the interface could be improved, though it has always been fine for me.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for about eight years.

How are customer service and support?

Veeam's technical support is great, I've been using it for the past ten years.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've worked with Tivoli Storage Manager, Commvault, Spectrum, and Symantec NetBackup, which is Veritas NetBackup now.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is easy.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't pay for the solution, so I can't comment on the cost.

What other advice do I have?

I rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

reviewer1107174

IT Manager at a insurance company with 201-500 employees

Jan 27, 2022

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Useful for restoring and scheduling jobs; very user-friendly and efficient

Pros and Cons

"A quick-working solution that is very user friendly."

"The solution needs more detailed reporting."

What is our primary use case?

The solution provides backup for my virtual infrastructure. We are customers of Veeam and I'm an IT manager.

What is most valuable?

The interface is user-friendly and the solution works quickly. It's also quite helpful for restoring. If there's an instance where I don't need to restore, I can easily copy-paste and that is a useful feature. It's simple to schedule jobs on Veeam and get whatever details you need, it really fulfills all our requirements.

What needs improvement?

It's sometimes difficult identifying the resources for backup and I think that could be improved. I'd also like to see more detailed reporting.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for almost four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

We haven't really needed to contact customer service.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used a different solution and switched to Veeam because it works faster, the recovery process is very quick, and it's easily scalable.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup wasn't too easy or too difficult. We had an integrator who helped us and it was a seamless process. Deployment took less than a day but integrating and customizing took some time, not only because of Veeam but as a result of the process involved in migrating from the previous solution. We have one person dealing with maintenance. We're using Veeam on 10 servers.

What was our ROI?

We have been using this product for the past three to four years now, and we have well and truly recovered the cost of implementing it.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Licensing costs are reasonable.

What other advice do I have?

I rate this solution eight out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

reviewer691557

Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a government with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 13, 2022

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Reasonably priced with good ransomware protection and the ability to expand

Pros and Cons

"Pricing is fairly reasonable and not overly expensive."

"If you upgrade too quickly, you may have issues."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the product for backup and replication purposes.

How has it helped my organization?

The manageability is very easy. It's one console and you can see all of the backups and the replication. The restore processes, the RTO and RPOs, are very low.

What is most valuable?

The best feature is the CDP - the snapshot integration into sand storage.

The new feature for ransomware protection has been great.

We have found the solution to be stable.

The scalability is good.

Pricing is fairly reasonable and not overly expensive.

What needs improvement?

The deployment process can be quite complex.

I can't speak to any features that are missing. It has everything we need.

If you upgrade too quickly, you may have issues.

Technical support could be better.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution since 2013.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable. That said, upgrades can give you problems if you upgrade too fast.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's very scalable, however, it can be complex to execute.

We have ten people who use it on a daily basis. It's pretty much used 24/7. It's a mission-critical product in our organization.

We do have plans to increase usage in the future.

How are customer service and support?

Sometimes it can be a bit slow to get assistance as we don't have production support. We just have the normal standard support, which makes sense. They can sometimes point fingers. For example, they might try to say "It's EMC or it's NetApp. It's not our product." That can be a bit of a problem.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used to use Symantec prior to 2013.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup and deployment were a while back. However, from my experience, I've deployed it three or four times. It's about a day to deploy and it can be complicated. It's not that easy if you don't know what's going on.

We just need one person to maintain the solution.

What about the implementation team?

We did not use a consultant from the vendor side. Everything was handled by our team. We did it in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We pay a yearly licensing fee.

We've found the pricing to be very reasonable. It's not overly expensive.

There are different tiers available, including Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus. We have the standard license.

What other advice do I have?

We are customers and end-users.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been pretty happy with its capabilities.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Anwar Haq

Sr. Solution Architect at Multilynx

Jan 12, 2022

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Responsive technical support, straightforward installation, and reliable

Pros and Cons

"My customers find the backup and recovery ease of use is the most beneficial feature."

"The recovery and integration features of Veeam Backup Replication could improve. For example, all VM integration could improve, such as with Hyper-V and VMware."

What is our primary use case?

Veeam Backup Replication is used by my clients as a backup and recovery solution.

What is most valuable?

My customers find the backup and recovery ease of use is the most beneficial feature.

What needs improvement?

The recovery and integration features of Veeam Backup Replication could improve. For example, all VM integration could improve, such as with Hyper-V and VMware.

There is not any kind of archiving feature that is provided and in a future release, there should be an archiving feature in this platform. They would be better able to compete with the other archiving solution. In the current scenario, if the customer wants to have an archiving feature, they will have to purchase another solution because we cannot have this archiving feature with Veeam Backup Replication.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Veeam Backup Replication for approximately five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Veeam Backup Replication has been stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of Veeam Backup Replication is good.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is good and responsive.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have used Commvault.

How was the initial setup?

The initial installation is quite easy and not very cumbersome. It's easy if you have a basic understanding of the architecture of the Veeam.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The subscription-based pricing of Veeam Backup Replication is competitive.

What other advice do I have?

The solution that we recommend more often depends on the use case. If there are other use cases that include bare metal recovery and archiving features then I would recommend another product, such as Commvault.

I would advise before implementing a solution such as Veeam Backup Replication that you have the training and skillset before implementation. This allows for proper implementation, best practices, and stability. It is helpful to have someone that is certified.

I rate Veeam Backup Replication an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:

ResulBiberoglu

Owner, Professional Services Manager at wguard

Jan 10, 2022

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Efficient backup, supports all vendors, and helpful documentation

Pros and Cons

"The most valuable features of Veeam Backup Replication are efficient backup and replication. Additionally, Veeam Backup Replication supports all products and vendors."

"The solution could improve by having more user-friendly dashboards."

What is our primary use case?

We use Veeam Backup Replication for data backup and replication.

We will upgrade to version 11 soon.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features of Veeam Backup Replication are efficient backup and replication. Additionally, Veeam Backup Replication supports all products and vendors.

What needs improvement?

The solution could improve by having more user-friendly dashboards.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Veeam Backup Replication for approximately six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Veeam Backup Replication is highly stable.

I had a customer that has been in operation for two years without any critical issues.

We do not have plans to increase usage at this time. We use the basic version at this time.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of the solution is good.

We have five people in my organization that use this solution and support 10 customers.

How are customer service and support?

I am in Turkey and the support is very important for the customer but it should be improved.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We have used Commvault previously but the customers cannot use Commvault for backups and replication, it is not included on the Commvault backup software.

Veeam Backup Replication allows both features.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Veeam Backup Replication was straightforward. Step by step, we did not have any problems.

What about the implementation team?

We have five people for maintenance of Veeam Backup Replication.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price of Veeam Backup Replication has been increasing their price and my customers are asking why. They have CPU-based licenses and a Universal License, the prices should be reduced.

What other advice do I have?

I would advise others that want to implement this solution to check the Veeam website for documentation and follow the information all step by step on how to install it. Everything is available in the documentation about implementation. If someone follows the documentation they will not have a problem with the implementation.

I rate Veeam Backup & Replication a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

reviewer1316730

Architecte Datacenter at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 16, 2021

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Offers many functionalities; very good data storing compression

Pros and Cons

"Good compression when storing data."

"The web interface could be more visual."

What is our primary use case?

We are integrators and resellers so we install this product in our clients' environment. I'm a data center architect.

What is most valuable?

A valuable feature is the compression when storing data. The product has a lot of functionalities even though they're not always used in my customers' environments.

What needs improvement?

I think that the web interface could be more visual. Also, when I was initially evaluating the solution, I had trouble finding detailed information about it and I think that could be improved too.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable.

How are customer service and technical support?

As integrators, we use our own support. The documentation is user friendly and that's enough for us.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing is on an annual basis and I think it's a good price.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Integrator