SureBackup is coming in Q3…are you ready? Click the link and register to stay informed!

OK, maybe that wasn’t so difficult after all.

If you’re going to be in New Orleans June 7-10, please stop by the Veeam booth and learn all about how you can manage VMware with Microsoft System Center. We’re going to have a good size booth and plenty of engineers on hand to demo our Veeam nworks Management Pack 5.5, including our new PRO Pack for SCVMM that we announced back at the Microsoft Management Summit.

Besides product demos we’re also going to be giving away “Got VMware” t-shirts and we’ll also have raffle drawings during the show where we’re giving away a free copy of Train Signal’s System Center Operations Manager Training. We’d like to thank our friends at Train Signal for working with us on this raffle. The drawing times for the raffle are below, make sure you’re at the Veeam booth for your chance to win.

• Monday 8 p.m.
• Tuesday 4:30
• Wednesday 4:30
• Thursday 2:45

The Veeam Team looks forward to seeing everyone in New Orleans!

Recently you may have seen a blog post created by Kelly Polanski, from Wave Break, and Jason Mattox from Vizioncore. In this blog post they say a number of things about Veeam as a company as well as about our Veeam Backup & Replication product. With the Vizioncore brand going away soon, we can only guess that this is a last ditch effort by Vizioncore marketing to try and convince customers to choose Vizioncore over Veeam. While we’re not going to address every point in the blog post, we do want to make sure our customers and ProPartners can feel confident with their chosen solution of Veeam Backup & Replication.

The intro is provided by Kelly Polanski who works for Wavelength, a marketing agency that Vizioncore has hired to help them with their social media. Wavelength is also affiliated with DCIG, a company that is known to be a “pay for play” blogger service and we assume the only place Vizioncore could turn to for something positive about their product . We’re also aware that Vizioncore is using this paid analyst briefing in their training to partners.

If you have followed Veeam’s announcements over the past several quarters then you know that Veeam is a financially strong and growing company. Our results from the first quarter of 2010 were announced several weeks ago and point to our continued success. Veeam is also an international company with offices across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific and 24×7 support worldwide. It is through our strong ProPartners that Veeam has been able to see such tremendous growth, a fact pointed out by CRN in a recent article. We’ve chosen not to name names previous to this, but the fact is that many of these partners came to Veeam because of their dissatisfaction with Vizioncore.

If you have any questions regarding the technical points of Jason Mattox’s blog post, please feel free to reach out to your local Veeam Team and schedule a time to discuss your questions with them or email me VMDoug<at>Veeam<dot>com. If you know Veeam and you’ve tried Veeam Backup & Replication then we’re sure you’ll see that most of Jason’s points were simply a desperate plea to try and spread rumors and make their product look better. Don’t believe Jason or us, put Veeam Backup & Replication in the lab and decide for yourself why Veeam is the #1 solution for VMware Backup and Disaster Recovery as chosen by SearchServerVirtualization.

Interestingly, more and more customers and partners are choosing Veeam. In 2009 Veeam added over 8,000 new customers while Vizioncore added less than 4,000* – that is two times more customers choosing Veeam! In Q1 of 2010 Veeam added 1,400 new customers while Vizioncore added less than 600* – that’s more than two times more customers choosing Veeam. The graphic representation of this is below:

*These estimates are based on Vizioncore marketing materials.

But of course don’t just take our word for it; here is what our customers and partners have to say about Veeam:

• INSANE BACKUP SPEED – Customer Feedback on Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0
• Worldwide Engineering Firm Increases Backup Speed by 93 Percent and Reduces Backup Monitoring Time to Zero
• File-Level Recovery Speed Improves Dramatically for School District
• HAMA, Specialist of Multimedia Accessories, Relies on Veeam Backup & Replication for Ongoing Virtualization Plans
• Veeam Backup & Replication™ to Become Tyco Electronics’ EMEA Standard
• More case studies

Another interesting trend is what Google shows in the terms of interest in our brand. As you can see, Veeam continues to rise while Vizioncore continues to fall. Desperate? Maybe…

How Veeam is trending

Changed Block Tracking

Veeam has supported CBT for over 8 months starting with our 4.0 release back in October of 2009. With the first anniversary of vSphere behind us, we’re glad to see some of the last vendors finally catching up and utilizing this technology. There’s also been some discussion online recently about possible issues with CBT, rest assured that Veeam has you covered and in over 8 months of CBT support, none of our customers has run into this issue. For more information on this, please check out this thread in our forums that also includes information on obtaining a fix if you feel you’re exposed to this issue.

Object-Level Restore

Most of you have heard by now of Veeam’s plans around Veeam Backup & Replication version 5 that includes the technology known as SureBackup. One of the things that makes me so excited about the new capabilities is that we’re going to be able to offer Universal Application Item-level Recovery – we’re not just talking about Exchange or files, but any data from any application without an additional charge for each application. Other vendors are promising object-level restore but only for Exchange and only if you purchase an additional and very expensive software tool (per mailbox) from their parent company. And yes, they’ve been promising this for years.

Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS)

While other vendors try to make it seem like they’re the “thought leaders” when it comes to VSS, the truth is that Veeam has been leading the way in VSS for VMware backups for almost 2 years now. We knew early on that the only way to ensure proper VSS support was to write our own implementation and not rely on VMware to provide it for us.  Additionally, with our VSS implementation everything is done at run time, no need to deploy and maintain a VSS agent executable on every Windows VM. Their implementation:

This driver is implemented as an .exe file which can be added to Windows 2003 and 2008 guests.

You can check out any of these previous posts on VSS if you want to know who the real thought leader is when it comes to VSS support on VMware:

Veeam Backup 2.0

Is your backup really VSS aware?

VSS and VMware ESX: What your VMware backup vendor isn’t telling you

The Great VSS Debate

Active Block What?

Now we’ve heard about this new technology that one of our competitors claims greatly improves the speed of backups. What they’re not telling you is all the limitations of this technology and the fact that it only makes FULL backups faster. Since Veeam uses a proven synthetic backup approach we only require 1 full backup. Here are some other limitations of that patent pending technology:

1. No benefit in incremental backups (deleting NTFS data does not update disk content, so data blocks do not change and are not picked up by CBT in an incremental backup)
2. Limited to NTFS and basic disks
3. Limited to full ESX since it relies on the Service Console (does not work with ESXi)
4. Not supported on direct SAN backups utilizing the vStorage API for Data Protection (90% of Veeam customers use VADP)
5. Without built-in dedupe their “full” backups are still larger than Veeam’s.

Be Careful What You Read, It May be Paid for

I’ve seen some materials that are pointing to an analysis provided by a “pay for play” blogger. I’m not going to mention names or link to sites here because I’d rather not give anyone the traffic. My only advice here (and this goes especially for the VAR community) is to research any “independent” sources your vendor is quoting, there’s a good chance they paid for that analysis and those words.

And finally, consider this: what does it mean when a vendor promotes a survey of beta customers in which 39% of the participants claimed reliability was the most important NEW capability. If reliability is a new capability, then I understand why so many partners and customers have chosen and continue to choose Veeam Backup & Replication

Let’s take a look at an example.

You come into work on Monday morning and you’ve got an inbox full of emails about a particular virtual machine. On Friday everything was working fine but on Monday it won’t respond, even though you can see it’s powered on and you can access the console through the vSphere client.

After a reboot doesn’t fix the issue, you now need to determine what changed. Using the vSphere client, you can see that doug.hazelman changed a custom attribute:

The screenshot above shows that the Custom Attribute “TEEAM_FUNCTION” was changed to PROD for the VM “XPViewTemp”. This is slightly helpful in that you know you have an automated process that reconfigures VM’s based on custom attribute values. Setting “TEEAM_FUNCTION” to PROD kicked off a script that moved it to the production network which is why people who could access it on Friday can’t access it today. The easy fix it to change “TEEAM_FUNCTION” back to the previous value…but what was it? The proper setting determines how this VM works, you need a quick resolution. Veeam Reporter to the rescue! All you need to do is run the infrastructure changes report showing all changes for that VM over the weekend. Clicking the name of the VM in the report, you can easily see that the old value was DEV:

Now all you have to do is change the attribute back to the correct value, let your automated script reconfigure the VM and you’re good to go!

The above example is a bit of a stretch (who automates VM configuration based on attributes?) but was meant to show how quickly and easily it is to get this data from Reporter 4. While the scenario above shows a change made in a relatively short time frame, what if the change had been made 2 months ago? How would use us the vSphere Client (or even PowerShell) to find who changed it as well as what the previous value was? Reporter 4 can give you that audit data for any time frame, you choose a date and Reporter shows you the configuration as it was on that date. If you want to see how an object has changed over a period of time (including WHO changed it), just select a time “window” for your report to get the detail.

There are a lot of powerful, new features in Reporter 4. I did the voice for this quick overview video, check it out and then download Reporter 4 to see what YOU can do with it.

I sat in on Edwin Yuen’s session, “BD02 Understanding How Microsoft Virtualization Compares to VMware” and I thought he did a great job at keeping it high level. I tweeted a few things while at the session, I think the best message I heard was:

VMDoug: “It’s all about management, pick the hypervisor that works for you. You don’t need to replace VMware” @edwinyuen #mms2010

That message fits in perfectly with the announcement Veeam made on Tuesday about closing the loop on VMware management. With the new Veeam/nworks Management Pack and PRO Pack combination, customers will be able to monitor and manage VMware from System Center the same way they manage Hyper-V. I know to a lot of the VMware crowd this may seem like a bit of a stretch, but remember, it’s about management, not the hypervisor. You can check out a video explanation by Veeam’s own Alec King here on YouTube:

Another great success at MMS was our book giveaway. Veeam gave out 500 copies of the book “Microsoft System Center 2007 R2 Unleashed”. Two of the authors, Kerrie Meyler and Cameron Fuller (pictured below), were at the Veeam booth signing copies and the lines were pretty long.

If you didn’t get a copy of the book at MMS don’t worry, Veeam has additional copies that we’ll be giving out at special events throughout the year.

The giveaways!

Of course people want to know what kind of swag they can expect from Veeam when they visit our booth #111. We will have our popular “blinky luggage tags” as well as some fine branded USB drives (loaded with Veeam goodness), but what about the “big giveaway”? I’m happy to announce that we’ll also be giving away copies of the latest and greatest book on Microsoft System Center Operations Manager: System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Unleashed by Kerrie Meyler, Cameron Fuller, John Joyner, Andy Dominey. We will have a limited number of copies available and as always it will be first-come-first-served so make sure to make you way to booth #111 quickly. We’re also happy to have the authors of the book on-hand in our booth to do book signings, the schedule is below. If you’d like to get an idea of the type of content in the book, check out a recent post on System Center Central where the authors talk about the Veeam nworks MP for VMware.

MMS Book Signing Schedule

The following times are when the authors of System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Unleashed will be at Veeam Booth #111 for book signings:

Tuesday: 1:00 – 2:00 PM

Wednesday: 1:00 – 2:00 and 5:00 – 6:00 PM

Thursday: 1:30 – 2:30 PM

So what does that mean for current customers? Will they get Standard or Enterprise if they’re current on maintenance? They answer is the choice is yours! Yes, for a limited time Veeam will be offering customers current on maintenance the choice of Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0 Standard or Enterprise once it’s released. This means that all of our current customers can rest easy and know that they’ll have the option of getting all the great new Virtualization-Powered Protection features that will be released later this year. Of course anyone who’s not a current customer but purchases Veeam Backup & Replication by 18 June 2010 will also be eligible for this offer.

If you’re not familiar with the Virtumania podcast put on by Rich Brambley and Mark Farley, be sure to check out Episode 6: “The Mean Green Veeam Team”, also available on iTunes. Rich and Mark invited David Siles and myself on to talk a little about Veeam and the virtualization market in general. I made an announcement about this offer on the podcast (right around 6:12).

What’s the difference?

While the exact details of the release a still being worked out, the table below details functionality that we know at this time to be included in Standard and Enterprise. You can also register for the upgrade here (along with more details on the offer): http://www.veeam.com/go/free-enterprise-upgrade

Feature	Standard	Enterprise	Notes
Data Protection Modes
Backup
Replication			2-in-1: backup and replication for one price, in one cohesive solution; includes replica rollback and replication to/from ESXi
Hot VM copy			Facilitates ad hoc backups and migrations
FastSCP™			Integrates Veeam FastSCP, the #1 file management tool for VMware administrators, into the operator console
Architecture
vStorage APIs			Highly efficiency and “future-proof” solution that uses the vStorage APIs for Data Protection
Changed Block Tracking			Lightning-fast incremental backups to minimize backup windows and allow for more frequent replication
Multiple backup options			Back up directly from SAN, over LAN, with virtual appliance, or direct from target
Centralized control of distributed deployment			Includes Enterprise Manager, a web-based console that provides a consolidated view of your distributed deployment; includes federation of multiple backup servers, centralized reporting, and consolidating alerting
FastSCP			Leverages Veeam’s proven FastSCP engine
Synthetic backup			Eliminates the need for periodic full backups (provides “forever incremental” backup), thus saving time and space
SmartDedupe™			10x space savings on backup storage
SmartCDP™			Near-continuous data protection (near-CDP) at a fraction of the cost of traditional CDP
Instant File-Level Recovery
Windows
Linux
Other			Unix, Solaris, BSD, Mac
Indexing and Search
Windows guest file system indexing			Creates an index (catalog) of all Windows guest files that have been backed up
Search across backups	Current backups	All backups (current & archived)	Quickly search for guest files across backups
SureBackup™
Recovery verification	Manual	Automated
Advanced VSS support
Application-Item Recovery
Universal application-item recovery			OS- and application-agnostic object-level recovery for application administrators
User-directed recovery			Available for any application with a web front-end

Fast forward a few years to 2007 and low and behold the old Aelita team had gotten back together to form Veeam Software. While I may not have realized the great opportunity initially at Aelita, I knew the opportunity at Veeam and it was really a non-decision for me to be part of it. I joined Veeam as the SE manager (and only SE at the time) and got to work building a team of SE’s that I can say are some of the best SE’s in the industry. As typical for startups, the people who join early usually end up wearing multiple hats and that’s no exaggeration for me. I found myself doing a number of different things: hiring and managing SE’s, product management, marketing, social media, sales, etc. In the past few weeks I’ve also done 99% of all the SureBackup briefings with analysts, press, bloggers and Veeam employees…the number of calls/presentations is somewhere around 40.

Getting to the point…

After that too long introduction, my point is that I’ve been given another great opportunity here at Veeam. Starting today I’ll be known as the Senior Director of Product Strategy. I’m very excited with this new role as it will allow me to interact with all the departments here at Veeam but also interact more closely with our partners, press, analysts and community with much more focus than I previously had time for. Many of you already know me more as VMDoug and less as the Director, Global Systems Engineer Group so the nice thing is that to the outside world this move is pretty transparent.

I’m also very happy to announce that taking my place on the SE side of things will be David Siles, aka dsiles, Veeam’s own vExpert and all around super-smart individual. David has been filling the role as Enterprise SE for North America for the past year and his new role will give him a global focus. I’m very happy to pass the torch to David as the new Director, Worldwide Technical Operations.

The final announcement today is something that’s been brewing for the past quarter. Ricky El-Qasem, aka rickyelqasem, will be Veeam’s new Director of Educational Services. Ricky came to Veeam from a UK distributor where he was responsible for training and has trained many of the current UK VCP’s. Ricky has done an outstanding job as an SE and now he gets to focus his energies on creating Veeam University and making sure that our channel partners and customers have the best training curriculum available.

I know both David and Ricky understood the opportunity when they came to Veeam and I’m happy to see them take advantage of it and move into these new roles. As for myself, expect to see me pick up my travels again this month as I get out there and spread the word about Veeam and the great products and people we have here.

Thanks,

Doug Hazelman
Senior Director, Product Strategy