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