Veeam released the new Backup & Replication v5 in October. The release date was marked by a Live Launch event webinar on October 20 that drew in almost 1500 attendees. The feedback that we have gotten so far has been outstanding and will provide us with the information we need to continue to improve.
As we have stated before, no other product possesses the capabilities that are available in Veeam Backup & Replication v5 with vPower. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago we found a dissatisfied Symantec customer who claimed that Veeam Backup & Replication v5 could do for him what Symantec couldn’t. We couldn’t resist and offered him the chance to try Veeam Backup & Replication. All we can say for now is so far so good!
In addition to being agentless, Veeam Backup & Replication v5 provides numerous advantages over legacy solutions such as Symantec Backup Exec, and has capabilities that Backup Exec is missing:
- Backup Exec lacks instant VM recovery and therefore cannot eliminate the need to extract the backup and copy it to production storage when recovering an entire VM.
- Backup Exec (agentless) lacks granular application-item recovery so it cannot provide a way out when a user accidently deletes important emails.
- Backup Exec does not provide instant file-level recovery from an image-level backup, to any point in time, on any OS and file system, in seconds.
- Backup Exec does not have the power to verify the recoverability of its backups.
- Backup Exec does not offer image-based replication and as a result it is not able to offer affordable near-CDP.
- Backup Exec DOES charge extra for deduplication, which seems to be an essential capability for any backup tool, seeing as how data volume is growing every day.
- Multiple backups are needed for different recovery scenarios with Backup Exec, whereas Veeam only needs one.
We recently looked at a price comparison of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 with Symantec Backup Exec 2010 and were shocked at the results. Besides not providing all the functionality, Symantec Backup Exec can cost upwards of 4 times more and still has 5 times less functionality than Veeam Backup & Replication v5.
| Veeam Backup & Replication v5 – Enterprise Edition |
Symantec Backup Exec 2010 | |
| Instant VM recovery | Yes | No |
| Granular application-item recovery | Any application | Select applications only, additional cost |
| File-level recovery | Any file system | Windows only |
| Recovery verification | Yes | No |
| Agentless | Yes | No |
| One backup for all recovery scenarios | Always | Sometimes |
| Synthetic full backups | Yes | No |
| Deduplication | Included | Extra cost |
| Replication | Yes | No |
| Cost | € 6,329* Simple, affordable | € 28,404* Complex, expensive |
*EMEA MSRP for the following configuration: 4 dual-socket ESXi servers connected to a SAN and hosting 1 Oracle server, 2 Microsoft Exchange servers, 4 Active Directory domain controllers, 2 SQL Server VMs, and 2 SharePoint Portal Server VMs.
Are you satisfied with your current backup solution? Are you willing to pay over 4 times more for 5 times less functionality?
