Competition

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures

Jun 2nd

Posted by vmdoug in Awards

2 comments

Not desperate for Veeam of course, but maybe for our competitors.

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:

image

*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:

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

FUD For Thought

May 21st

Posted by vmdoug in Competition

3 comments

This post is meant to be educational but I realize many of you will see it as FUD. I won’t deny that this post is an attempt at answering the FUD put forth by one of our competitors as they prepare to release a fix update to their backup product, so I guess just take everything below with an open mind and realize that the virtualization marketplace is very competitive. Customers have chosen and will continue to choose the best software for VMware backup and replication!

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

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Veeam Backup & Replication 4

Nov 22nd

Posted by vmdoug in Competition

3 comments

A few weeks ago Veeam released Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0. I should have written a post the week it was released but I’ve been pretty busy and I also wanted to wait and get some of our customer’s reactions before writing about it. Our 4.0 release is a major milestone for us since it provides full support for the vStorage APIs for Data Protection. There appears to be a bit of confusion with some on what the vStorage APIs for Data Protection really do, especially when compared with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB). As VMware states on the vStorage page, the vStorage APIs for Data Protection are the next generation of VCB. For a good explanation on the differences, check out my friend @Gostev’s blog over at vNotion “What is VMware vStorage API?”

So why do we still have support for VCB? The simple answer is that we have a number of current customers that are using VCB and have not switched over to vSphere yet. We could have dropped support for VCB but then that would require us to maintain both 3.x and 4.x releases. Since 4.0 is an built upon 3.x and not a complete re-write of the software, we left VCB support in for our customers. The benefit is that our customers have a choice of how to process their backups: vStorage APIs, VCB or Veeam’s Service Console or Network modes. Of course I do recommend that customers use the vStorage API methods, it gives you the best performance and is also built specifically for vSphere.

Up to 10x Faster

Yes, it’s really true and our customers have posted as much on our forums. We’ve consolidated this feedback into a handy PDF document INSANE BACKUP SPEED, it’s not us saying this, it’s real people using our 4.0 product.

How is it so fast? One of the biggest reasons is Changed Block Tracking (CBT) which is included in the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). With CBT enabled for VM’s running on ESX or ESXi 4.x, VMware actually tracks the block level changes made to the VMDK. This way, when software like Veeam Backup & Replication takes a Snapshot, VMware returns a list of what blocks have changed. This significantly increases backup speed as we no longer have to try and determine the changes ourselves, VMware tells us in a matter of seconds.

The Critics

Of course anytime a vendor releases software that’s cutting edge and ahead of the rest of the field, others will try and knock it down. This recently happened on a blog sponsored by one of our competitors, claiming Veeam Backup & Replication was corrupting data. Of course when I first saw this I was a bit alarmed, but since they included a link to our forum where a user was reporting the problem, I followed the link and realized they were just sensationalizing something for their own apparent gain. Since this particular blog decides to heavily moderate comments, I thought I would post the facts here, lest any other competitors decide they want to sensationalize this non-issue.

The Facts

Taken from the Veeam Forum post:

  1. Backups are NOT corrupted.
  2. You can only run into this issue with NON-DEFAULT restore mode, in 1 restore mode of 3 existing modes.
  3. Despite what competition may be claiming, there is no actual user data loss or corruption – VM will still boot and work.

The only real issue is OS and file system check tools complaining about unexpected content of the unused disk blocks. Linux ext3 file system and disk test tools merely suspect a problem seeing unused blocks being non-zeroed, and warn about this. This is specific to certain file systems only, for example, Windows NTFS considers this situation absolutely normal.

Of course every software has bugs, the example above is a bug in our software when using 1 particular recovery method and we have a fix available and it will be included in our next release. The important piece of information is that NO DATA WAS EVER CORRUPTED, just an issue on recovery and zero byte blocks. We are very thankful to our active forum  community and for bringing this to our attention. Veeam’s motto after all is “Listening to You, Building the Tools You Need”, it’s on the back of all of our business cards. I’d like to point out the below points about our user forum:

  • Our forum is one of our greatest resources where people share their experience, best practices and getting support from Veeam and the community
  • We understand that our competitors are so desperate that they will continue using our own forum to try and fool the community
  • We will continue to be honest and direct with our customers in our forum vs. ending all the threads with ‘please contact our support’
  • User feedback: The quality and effectiveness of this Forum alone would be enough to justify switching to Veeam, even if the product wasn’t superior to its competition (as it is at the moment). It seems just too good to be true… I hope it will continue this way!

Conclusion

Sorry to waste so much space on this post answering the competition. If they would allow comments on their own blog I would have written it there. In closing I just want to say that we encourage everyone to evaluate our software and make decisions for themselves. Put us in the lab and you will see, others promise, Veeam delivers!

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Put us in the lab!

Sep 21st

Posted by vmdoug in Competition

4 comments

If you’re on the Veeam distribution list you’ll be getting some of the text below today as part of an ecard. I wanted to go ahead and blog it here as well because I think it’s an important message from Veeam. Sorry if this seems to be a bit of a marketing message (but it’s important to me):

“We’ve received numerous questions from our partners and customers on why a competing product won the Gold award in the Business Continuity & Data Protection category. We know that judges are put in a difficult position when they have to choose from almost 200 products in a short period of time. For this award, the judges cannot, and do not, install, test or evaluate the products in a lab. Instead, they mostly rely on vendor statements in their judging process. We encourage all customers to “Put Veeam in the Lab” for a head-to-head comparison with competitive products, and make the right decision for your environment. We are confident you will find out why Veeam Backup & Replication is #1 for VMware backup.”

So, if you’re interested in seeing why Veeam is #1, fill out the form here and we’ll send you some information as well as help you get started on evaluating Veeam Backup & Replication in YOUR environment so you can makeup your own mind on who the winner really is.

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The videos are in (VOTE)

Jun 16th

Posted by vmdoug in Competition

No comments

Just a quick update to let everyone know that the Veeam videos for the VMworld contest are in and have been posted to the forums for voting. I can’t endorse any of them here but of course I’m sure we all have favorites. Do you? Well then vote!

We’ve heard that some people are having issues registering on our forums. We do apologize for that but in an effort to keep out spam we have to dis-allow certain email domains (gmail, hotmail) and we also have a CAPTCHA that has been made a bit more user friendly (black and white instead of color). I didn’t realize until just the other day that some color CAPTCHA’s are very difficult for people who are color blind.

Anyway, vote for your favorite and be sure to leave a comment. There’s a bonus prize of a Flip going to the person with the best comment.

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What a Difference a Year Makes

Mar 20th

Posted by vmdoug in Competition

No comments

This interesting little tidbit was just brought to my attention by one of my very alert Systems Engineers. It would seem that when customers do case studies, you should follow-up with those customers to make sure the case study is still valid because a lot can change in one year.

February 2008 – Customer does a case study

March 2009 – Same customer does another case study, this time for Veeam

If you read the one from 2008, then the one from 2009 (for Veeam) can you draw a link as to who the “competitor” is referenced in the 2009 Veeam case study?

We all know this virtualization market is highly competitive and many people have asked how Veeam can claim that we’re #1 for VMware backup. I think the example above speaks for itself. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Veeam is #1 for VMware backup