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

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

What we’re talking about with verification has nothing to do with how we store our backups but everything to do with the virtual machines inside of our backups. Our synthetic backup approach is a proven technology that we did not invent, simply refined. Our source based de-duplication of data as well as removal of “empty” blocks has been proven for over 2 years in production environments. So if you think all of this buzz is just about verifying the integrity of the “backup file”, think again.

Some history

Veeam R&D did not initially set out to provide verification capabilities. We were actually doing research into how to provide functionality that our customers were asking for, namely application-item level recovery. Since we are doing image-level backups, how could we allow our customers to retrieve individual application items such as email, SQL, etc.? Some vendors recommend backing up data twice, once with an image-level product and again with a different agent based product (with specific agents for each application). This approach means 2 backup vendors (not integrated), resource contention on hosts and almost double your backup space…we knew there had to be a better way.

Building on our advanced file-level recovery capability we knew that if we could just start a recovered VM we could then start the application and pull out individual application items. In the past this was done by restoring the entire VM in an isolated network, a process that can take a considerable amount of time and effort for just 1 email. What if we could just run the VM from the backup file without having to extract it? R&D quickly got to work to see if this was even possible…

The Aha Moment

Sometimes in software development you start out to solve one problem and in the process realize that you can solve other problems, problems that no one ever thought could be solved. When was the last time you started a server running from a tape backup? When was the last time you verified the ability to successfully recover (and start) all of your servers that have been backed up (monthly? quarterly? yearly? never?)?

Veeam R&D quickly realized that they were on to something big here, what some call the “aha moment”…what if we could startup the VM’s directly from the backup file in an isolated environment just after the backup occurs? Could we actually give our customers peace-of-mind that their image level backups (which are simply crash consistent) would perform as expected if they needed to do a full recovery? The answer to those questions is “Yes we can”!

Verification

So that is how this whole verification idea came about, we wanted to provided item-level recovery and we ended up doing that as well as something thought impossible by many.

Verification is:

• Comprehensive – maintain dependencies across VM’s (email, directory, DNS) to provide the verification
• Flexible – allows custom scripts in verification jobs based on specific OS and application
• Fast – starts the VM’s, checks them and shuts them down…in minutes
• Non-destructive – No changes are made to what’s stored in the backup, the verification environment is fenced off from production
• Automatic – Once the jobs are created, they run on schedule
• Peace-of-Mind – once verified, you know you can recover the VM’s and they will work.

So when you think about verification, take the points above into consideration. Verifying the integrity of a backup file is easy, verifying the fact that the VM will work when it’s recovered? That’s not so easy…but it will be soon.

“Wow – you guys are smart!”

“This is unique – it’s really cool. Very powerful.”

“I applaud you for this – this is a big push forward.”

“No one else is doing this!”

“This is very exciting stuff. You’re hitting on a need that’s currently not being met.”

“I wish I had had this a few years ago when I was in IT!”

“Leveraging the investment you’ve made in backups to do more”

Update: March 11, 2010 – “what you are doing is absolutely necessary and will take a lot of burden from a lot of people”

Update: March 15, 2010 – Here’s a Twitter quote from Chris Wolf at Burton Group

Update: March 16, 2010: Did 4 calls back to back this morning, here’s some select reactions:

“there’s never been anything like this before”

“Veeam is making several Leadership moves in the new paradigm of server virtualization and enabling organizations to do new things”

“Looks so simple… how come no one ever thought of this before”

“Current process is extremely expensive and time consuming… this is the answer”

Update March 17, 2010: Just one for today…

“I’m not a guy that’s easily impressed and you just impressed me”

Notice that I have not said who said the above, I won’t quote an analyst without their permission and of course they’re a bit vague too…but it’s not just us that’s excited about what we’re getting ready to release. We have many more analysts to talk to and I’m sure we’ll get more quotes, many of them may even show up in our press release with the analysts who said them.

Check back for updates!

So in looking around for solutions which best incorporated these new features I eventually came across Veeam. Utilising the thin provisioning feature to remove the overhead of no longer seeking out empty disk blocks and the unnecessary backing up of those empty blocks, Veeam also incorporates compression algorithms on the target backup device. Hence Veeam have a solution that not only reduces the amount of space used on the source host datastores but also the target backup storage device.

Of course WE believe that Veeam has the best solution for vSphere 4.0 and it’s good to see others out there recognize that fact. With Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 not only do we fully support the vStorage API for Data Protection and the VDDK but we also fully support ESXi, for both Backup AND Replication. As I’ve been talking to partners over the past few weeks at VMware Partner Exchange and even our friends at Mirazon, they’ve indicated that Changed Block Tracking is perhaps the BEST reason customers should upgrade to vSphere 4 and our customers agree: Insane Backup Speed.

Veeam was also very happy to win Gold in SearchServerVirtualization’s Product of the Year for 2009, further proof that yes, Veeam Backup & Replication is the best backup solution for vSphere 4.

Finally, I’d like to address Archie’s final note in his post:

So while Veeam are currently leading the way, the time is certainly ripe for more third party APIs to be developed and incorporated making VM backup nightmares a thing of the past.

Of course we do face increasing competition in this space. I don’t want to start a comment war so I should mention that both EMC Avamar and Symantec Backup Exec 2010 do now have support for the vStorage API for data protection. Some of our other competitors have also “announced” support for CBT for so far it’s just been talk and no shipping product.

Does all this mean that Veeam is just taking a break to let our competitors catch up to us? Of course not! Over the next few months Veeam is preparing to change the way you think about backups…FOREVER! I can’t disclose anything yet, but watch this space, the countdown has begun!

UPDATE: In case you’re wondering, the next version of Veeam Backup & Replication will not require a complete reinstall/re-architecture. SureBackup is an entirely new feature that will easily integrate in with existing Veeam Backup & Replication installations.

OpenBench Lab Report: Better Data Protection for VMware vSphere

By Jack Fegreus Managing Director openBench Labs.

System and storage virtualization introduces multiple levels of logical abstraction and resource redirection that can obscure and complicate important IT operations. Among the hardest hit IT operations are those associated with file-level data protection.
Read this white paper by industry expert Jack Fegreus to learn how you can:

• Minimize vSphere disk risk with backup and replication – combine backup and near-CDP-level replication to unify both data protection processes for IT with a synthetic backup process and consistent process wizards.
• Maximize backup performance with deduplication and compression – how you can reduce the footprint of full VM’s backups by 3 – 9 times with data deduplication, compression, and recognition of thin provisioning.
• Leverage full support for ESX and ESXi without VCB – fully utilize the new vStorage API or VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) when performing backup or replication, allowing SMB sites with or without shared storage to fully leverage ESXi, including the ability to replicate VMs to an ESXi host.
• Dramatically increase full and incremental backup speed and reduces storage requirements by utilizing new vSphere Changed-Block Tracking and thin provisioning.
• Higher RPO support via Virtual CDP with replication – leverage inline data deduplication and compression to provide near continuous data protection (CDP) with replication.
• Ensure transaction consistency at VM and application levels – ensure VM transaction consistency and Volume Shadow Services (VSS) for VSS-aware Windows applications such as Active Directory, SQL Server, and Exchange.

Download this white paper and learn how to ensure better VMware vSphere data protection through unified backup and replication.

http://www.veeam.com/go/better-data-protection-vsphere

5 Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery

By Eric Siebert

VMware vSphere™, the industry’s first cloud operating system, leverages the power of virtualization to transform datacenters into dramatically simplified cloud-computing infrastructures. VMware vSphere includes many new features and technological enhancements that can benefit you. While there are several reasons to upgrade to vSphere, this white paper focuses on how VMware vSphere and its vStorage technologies improve data protection and disaster recovery.

Read this white paper by industry expert Eric Siebert to learn how you can leverage vSphere to achieve:

• 30% average reduction in storage space
• 50% average increase in backup speeds when performing full backup
• 90% average increase in backup speeds when performing incremental backups
• 80% lower cost for near continuous data protection (CDP)
• Increased reliability

About the Author
Eric Siebert is a 25-year IT veteran whose primary focus is VMware virtualization and Windows server administration. He is one of the 300 VMware vExperts for 2009, author of the book “VI3 Implementation and Administration” and a frequent TechTarget contributor. In addition, he maintains vSphere-land.com, a VMware information site.

http://www.veeam.com/go/vmware-vsphere-backup-wp

How Virtualization Cuts CDP Costs by 80%

By David Davis Director of Infrastructure at TrainSignal.com

Until recently, CDP has been used only by the largest enterprise companies and only for their most critical data. For small and medium businesses (SMBs)—it was simply cost-prohibitive.
Thanks to virtualization, advanced disaster recovery methods that result in fast recovery and low system downtime are now available to all organizations, from the largest enterprise to the smallest business, for a very reasonable cost.
This white paper compares 3 different options of implementing CDP:

• “Legacy CDP” or Classic SAN-based CDP
• Software-based Server Replication
• Virtualization-enabled “Near-CDP”

Download this white paper and learn how to ensure business continuity and enable disaster recovery at an affordable price

http://www.veeam.com/go/vmware_vsphere_continuous_data_protection