The move was necessary for several reasons, most of which have to do with the fact that Veeam recognizes the value of blogging and rather than starting from scratch we decided to move VeeamMeUp. We’ve imported all of the content over and have redirected the traffic from VeeamMeUp to this new address so (hopefully) any incoming links will be preserved as well as any internal links. Of course with any migration there’s always the chance for an issue so if you notice something, please comment or let me know at VMDoug at Veeam dot com.

I will still be providing much of the content as VMDoug but you’ll also see some other contributors here as well. Our goal is to open up the blog to the smart people we have here at Veeam so that they can contribute as well. Who knows, we might even see a post or two from Ratmir.

For now, here’s a quick list of what’s been going on the past month…

• Veeam announced as Finalist for Microsoft Partner of the Year
• Veeam announces support for vSphere 4.1 and Monitor 5.0 Beta
• Veeam participates in Tech Field Day 3 in Seattle
• Veeam announces “Christmas in August” and Free Reporter
• Veeam announces record second quarter results for 2010

-doug

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

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.