Best of TechEd 2013 Finalist: Veeam Provides Comprehensive Protection for the Virtual Infrastructure

I always enjoy speaking with Veeam about the success story that is Veeam Backup & Replication. The company likes to say that its virtualization-targeted data-protection solution solves the “3C problem” associated with physical backup tools that have been retrofitted for virtual environments (issues with capabilities, complexity, and cost), and if the company’s ever-upward trajectory is an indication, Veeam is communicating its strengths in just the right way. Dubbed “Modern Data Protection,” the technology underlying Veeam Backup & Replication is relied on by more than 60,000 customers protecting over 4 million VMs worldwide.

Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 is a finalist in the Backup/Recovery category of the Best of TechEd 2013 awards. I asked Doug Hazelman, vice president of product strategy, about what sets Veeam apart from the competition, and he touted the product’s speed and unique capabilities. The Instant VM Recovery feature can recover a failed virtual machine (VM) is as little as 2 minutes, and—at this Microsoft-focused conference—the product’s ability to protect Hyper-V as well as VMware from one web console is another standout feature. I was particularly taken with the VeeamZIP feature, which lets you back up a VM on-the-fly for operational, archival, or portability purposes. And how about Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange? At no additional charge, you can get instant visibility into Exchange backups for easy e-discovery and item recovery (e.g., individual emails, notes, contacts).

Veeam Backup & Replication utilizes image-based backup and recovery, providing near-continuous data protection for any virtualized application, with included failover and failback. Hazelman spoke of Veeam’s change block tracking, which enables faster backups by tracking changes as they occur, while avoiding the overhead of difference scans during incremental backups and replica updates. Instant File-Level Recovery can quickly recover an individual file directly from an image-based backup regardless of OS or file system. You can back up all VMs as often as you want and replicate them onsite for high availability or offsite for disaster recovery. Veeam Backup & Replication provides application-aware backup and recovery as well as granular and in-place restore—all without agents. And it’s storage-agnostic.

Veeam provides essential backup and replication for an increasingly virtualized world. Instead of merely tolerating the virtual environment, Veeam leverages it to provide the most comprehensive protection for the virtual infrastructure.