SureBackup and vPower

We started off the Spring of 2010 with our big announcement regarding SureBackup. This announcement was important for us because we knew that it was going to take some time to understand just what Recovery Verification was all about.

When you introduce something new to the market, you need to give enough time for it to soak in. When the summer came around, we started talking about vPower or Virtualization Powered-Data Protection. I gave the first live demo of SureBackup Recovery Verification, Instant VM Recovery and Universal Application Item Recovery (U-AIR) at TechFieldDay 3 in Seattle and it was very well received. So well received in fact that one of our competitors announced something very similar to our patent-pending Instant VM Recovery a few weeks later that to this day still has not been released.

Microsoft Partner of the Year Finalist

At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference held in June, Veeam was recognized as a finalist for Partner of the Year in the Core Infrastructure Solutions, Systems Management category. This was great recognition for Veeam, specifically around our Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware.

Launch of Veeam ONE

Veeam is more than Backup & Replication, we also have a major focus on VMware infrastructure management. Veeam ONE was launched to create a single solution that customers could look to for monitoring, capacity planning, change management, reporting and chargeback. Also, since different customers need different monitoring solutions depending on their environment, Veeam ONE comes in 3 different flavors, including flavors for Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager.

Best of VMworld

For me the best part of VMworld 2010 in San Francisco was winning 4 “Best of VMworld” awards. Not only did the then current version of Veeam Backup & Replication (v4) get a finalist award in its category for the 2nd year in a row, Veeam ONE also was chosen as a finalist in its category. Of course when it comes to new technology, Veeam Backup & Replication v5 was the big winner with the Gold award and the top prize, Best of Show. This was the first time in the history of the awards that one vendor received 4 awards.

v5 Launch

With all of the excitement and buzz we created around SureBackup and vPower, it was great to finally release v5 to the market and watch it take off. For the launch “event,” we had more than a thousand people on a live webcast and on that day we hit an all time record for web traffic to veeam.com. So far we’ve had over 60,000 downloads and so many positive comments regarding the revolutionary functionality.

Informal poll at Gartner Data Center Conference

While not an official Gartner survey, this quick poll of 178 attendees at the 2010 Gartner Data Center Conference shows that Veeam Backup & Replication is used by the same percentage as backup solutions from the “bigger” vendors. Here’s a graphic showing the results:

The Awards!

There has been no shortage of awards for Veeam in 2010 and they seem to keep rolling in. The following were all in addition to the VMworld awards mentioned above.

• Best Free vSphere Tools – As I previously blogged about, Veeam took the top 3 spots in the VMwarevideos.com and vChat Best Free vSphere Tools survey.
  
• Virtualization Review – Veeam was also awarded 2 Reader’s Choice Awards from Virtualization Review in their 2011 Virtualization Buyer’s Guide. Veeam ONE took a merit award and Veeam Backup & Replication v5 was named a winner. These awards are based on reader input so we would like to thank everyone who voted for Veeam.
  
• SearchServerVirtualization.com Products of the Year 2010 – We were very happy to have won 2 Product of the Year awards from SearchServerVirtualization.com. Veeam Backup & Replication v5: 2010 Product of the Year in the Backup and Storage for Virtualization and v4 was also the Product of the year for 2009 in the same category – that’s 2 years in a row! Also, Veeam ONE: 2010 Product of the Year in the Virtualization Management category, that marks the first time in the history of the awards that one company has taken GOLD in 2 categories in the same year.

  

• Storage Magazine | SearchStorage.com Product of the Year – Veeam Backup & Replication v5: 2010 Product of the Year in the Backup and Disaster Recovery Software and Services category. When looking at who we beat out, this is a pretty significant award for us!
  

The Results!

155%

Of course all the awards don’t really mean much without good financials to back them up. As our press release announced, Veeam had a very, very good year financially with 155% growth over last year. Being a private company we don’t detail the exact revenue, but when you consider we’ve grown over 100% each of the past 4 years it’s not difficult to figure out. So when you consider Veeam as a company to do business with, understand that we’re still growing, we’re still 100% self-funded and we’re profitable!

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.