Veeam Data Platform Reviews

The highly granular yet simple restoration capabilities for critical applications such as Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and Oracle, via an agentless single-pass backup. The deep integration with NetApp Integrated Data Protection capabilities, including controlling and managing Snapshots, SnapMirror and SnapVault, as well as the ability to provide granular, automated restoration from these protection sources. Lastly, the ability to leverage backup data copies directly for disaster recovery, test & development and/or data mining activities.

Veeam Backup allows FLEXdata Solutions to offer a more complete data protection strategy to our client-base, and one that delivers greater business value than the majority of legacy backup solutions in-place today.

Each organisation we work with has different data protection products and processes in place, so we are exposed to many different products and approaches. We specifically chose to partner with Veeam for a number of technical and commercial reasons. These include its rich feature set coupled with ease-of-use, strong roadmap, roadmap delivery history, simple and predictable licensing model, channel model, and deep integration with NetApp Integrated Data Protection features.

• Scheduling functionality is not as intuitive or as flexible as it could be.
• Some terminology can also be confusing or misleading.
• For service providers, multi-tenancy capabilities could be enhanced.
• Greater capabilities to protect physical hosts and applications would expand the use cases.
• Continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities would be well received.

I've been using it for 18 months.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

The product is very stable.

It is highly scalable.

They’re great from a partner point of view, but I can’t comment from an end-user point of view.

The initial set-up and configuration is straightforward, and the product can be installed and configured to protect data very quickly. However, like all data availability products, you must understand the data flow and the “plumbing” required to support data movement for backup, replication, and restoration activities. Most importantly, the data protection strategy must align to business requirements and expectations, so upfront design and planning is important to ensure a successful outcome.

FLEXdata implement Veeam B&R for our clients, working in partnership with their in-house teams. Putting in design and planning effort upfront ensures we deliver successful outcomes to our clients.

The Veeam B&R licensing model is very straightforward – it is licensed per-CPU socket of virtualisation host system. This provides a predictable cost model, and avoids the often crippling “virtual machine tax” that capacity–based or agent/system-based licensing structures can impose. It is also recommended to consider Veeam's bundled offers, such as the Availability Suite or procuring additional maintenance/support upfront.

Firstly understand the business requirements and expectations, then design and architect the deployment in line with these requirements. Ensure you get the “plumbing” right, never forgetting that the reason you backup is that one day you may have to restore. Plan and prepare for that day.

The functionality available with Veeam enterprise licenses, allow a VMware vSphere snapshot to be integrated and transferred to HP 3PAR storage snapshots; this effectively off-loads all backup traffic to the storage network. The Original VMware snapshot is then released (this process takes less then a minute), and Veeam continues the backup operation directly form the 3PAR storage. This operation ensures minimal impact on the VM, VM network and Host hypervisor, while ensuring backups are performed at storage network speeds (8Gb fibre).

Reverse incremental backups with block level changes - Following the initial seed backup, only block level changes are captured in the following daily backups. This ensures backup times are kept to a minimum and reduces the amount of data that is replicated to additional disk off-site.

50x WAN optimisation - With the enterprise licence option you get WAN optimisation. this reduces the amount of bandwidth required to replicate VMs or backup copies off-site. I use this to transfer all VM backups to a co-location storage device at a dedicated DR site.

Instant recovery - this allows a Veeam protected VM to be instantly booted direct from the backup image. Veeam creates an NFS Datastore and presents this to the selected Esxi host. This can be used to test backups are being taken correctly, to recover a live VM or as a low cost DR solution. Once a VM is booted, this can be migrated live using vMotion back to production storage.

By using Veeam, backups times for the entire virtual environment have been reduced, and backup windows now have no impact on production VMs.

Instant recovery has revolutionised client DR plans, reducing recovery time objectives (RTO) and improving available recovery point objectives (RPO).

Also as Veeam "just works" less time is spent troubleshooting backup technologies and failed backups.

The amount of disk space required for the long term storage of backups (archiving Weekly / Monthly / yearly backups) can be higher then expected if you have a large daily change rate in your VM. This needs to be planned for when considereing long term arciving of backup files.

I have been working with Veeam for 18 months since the initial pilot.

If using off-site replication with WAN optimization, the initial Seed backups of VMs need to be taken locally and then transferred to off-site. Attempting to transfer these over the WAN can cause bandwidth saturation.

No issues.

No issues, additional physical or backup servers can be added using existing hardware or VMs to distribute the backup load as the envirnmnet grows.

Very good support from account manager and on-line portal.

Very good support, however as Veeam is simple to deploy only limited technical support was required during deployment.

Backups of VMs were previously taken using i365 data vault this added additional load to ESXi hosts and VMs during backup windows, switching to Veeam removed this load and enhanced recovery options for all VMs; i365 also provides block level incremental forever backups and replicates to our DR site, we continue to use this for the remaining physical machines.

• Efficiency
• Objectivity
• Reliability
• Features

Restores are easier to do.

It would be nice to be able to copy VMs directly to tape drives.

I've been using it for three years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

10/10.

10/10.

We previously used Backup Exec, but Veeam rules.

It was straightforward.

No other options were considered.

Veeam B&R is a reliable product and is the best disaster recovery I have ever seen. It's very simple to use and all the features are a must-have.

I use the backup, replication, and the backup copy features. The most useful one is the backup feature.

I have a backup of my infrastructure every night, and have improved the speed of performing restores.

I think it is a good product but all products could be better.

I've used it for two years.

No issues with deployment, nothing went wrong.

This product has saved a lot of my time, as it’s very stable.

I have only needed to open two tickets in two years.

I have only needed to open two tickets in two years.

Yes, I previously used Microsoft System Center but Veeam is better, faster and easy to use and configure.

It's easy and very straightforward to configure.

It was implemented in-house.

I would recommend you buy this product because it is simple to use and works fine.

The ability to perform exchange restores.

Surebackup allows verification of the backup. This provides a higher level of confidence.

I've used it for two years.

No issues encountered.

If there is a communication interruption (ping drops) between the proxy and the Veeam server, the backup fails.

No issues encountered.

It's excellent.

It's just below excellent.

We previously used Backup Exec and ArcServe. These companies are too big to care even for their own products.

It depends on the organizations structure and level of optimization.

It was an in-house implementation.

Just recently, I retired Backup Exec, and added Veeam v8. This increased the backup scope by 30% and reduced tape usage by 70%

No, but the pricing was key.

Try it. Spend maybe one hour a week on the phone with their engineer to tweak things before buying. The product practically sells itself.

I really like the reporting. You can build your own reports and schedule to send them any time. I also like the fact that alerts are resolved automatically if there is no longer an issue.

From a storage prospective we were getting alerts when the Hyper V LUNS reached the threshold and we were able to fix the space issue before something worse happened.

No more surprises about our Hyper-V environment, storage.

Better description of the problems as the alerts are missing good descriptions. Sometimes you need to spend extra time to Google the error because the information from the alerts is not clear enough.

I've used it for two years.

Deployment is very simple, the installation wizard is very easy and then it is just simply adding whatever you want to monitor.

I don't have any stability issues.

I need to give them 10/10. All the cases are resolved in the time they give.

We used PRTG but we were getting a lot of false positives.

If you are using a virtualized environment, there is nothing better than Veeam Backup and Veeam One.

If you deploy Veeam Backup and Veeam One, you will sleep much better.

- CBT (Change block tracking)

- Agent less

- Replication

- Dedupe

- Reducing backup storage

- Reducing backup time

Physical servers backup.

2 Years.

Yes, but solved in a few time by the support.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

10/10 - Very fast answer and follow up.

10/10.

Symantec Netbackup. We changed when we saw the promise of Veeam.

And these promises have been delivered!

Straightforward. More simple to administrate than a Netbackup or other one.

No, we implemented in house, with help of the support line.

Divide the cost of the backup by 2!

Actually, the cost is more than one hour of work per day (at maximum). I don't know the real cost of installation.

None, this is a competitive upgrade purposed by Veeam.

Simplicity!