Many vendors say the latest version of their application gives the solution a boost, but Veeam Software makes it a literal promise.
That’s because Version 7.0 of its Backup & Replication software for virtualized environments includes WAN acceleration.
“Backups are a lot of data, and customers need to have multiple copies of those backups, but doing it over the WAN can be costly and time consuming,” explained Doug Hazelman, Veeam’s vice-president of product strategy,
“By including WAN acceleration it allows us to copy these large files over the WAN (to an offsite location), and it’s optimized for our data (unlike a general WAN accelerator).”
He estimates acceleration technology is up to 50 times faster than a regular file copy of a backup.
In the not too distant future WAN acceleration will be added for replication, he said.
Also new in V. 7.0 is the ability to backup from storage snapshots from Hewlett-Packard storage. This lets the application leverage the power of storage hardware as a source for backups, rather than they hypervisor snapshots. Hazelman said. This is better than trying to use VMware Snapshots, he said.
Snapshots are ideal for backups because they don’t impact ongoing storage processes, says Veeam. But for safety the data has to be stored off the storage area network, in case the SAN goes down.
Until now, says Veeam, there haven’t been robust tools for backup from snapshots.
Initially snapshot backups are supported only on Hewlett-Packard’s StoreVirtual and StorServ lines. Veeam believes this will increase performance so customers will be able to backup virtual machines more often and during production hours.
However there is a price for gaining these new capabilities.
WAN acceleration and snapshot are only available in the new Enterprise Plus edition of Backup & Recovery, which sells for US$1,999 per socket on the source host.
Until now the suite was only sold in an Enteprise Edition ($1,250 per socket) and a Standard Edition ($750 per socket).
Veeam products are available through solution providers. In Canada they include Informatique ProContact of Quebec City and Montreal, and Linkbynet of Montreal.
Headquartered in Switzerland, Veeam was founded in 2006 by partners who had started and sold a startup. According to Hazelman, its first product was a free application for moving large files.
In 2008 it released Veeam Backup & Replication, which includes deduplication. It is certified for VMware and Hyper-V environments.