Backup and storage for virtualization
Gold Award:
Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0
Choosing winners for the Backup and Storage category for SearchServerVirtualization.com's Products of the Year was difficult -- to say the least. In side-by-side comparisons, the top two contenders in the field of virtualization backup often flip-flop. But interestingly, this year the virtualization backup market features a new player: Symantec Corp. While Symantec is hardly new to backup, it is new to the direct-virtualization backup field.
This year's Products of the Year featured many worthy candidates, however, and here are the winners. And a hearty congratulations to our three Backup and Storage category finalists.
The Gold Award in the Backup and Storage category goes to a longtime leader in the virtualization backup marketplace: Veeam Software Inc. By combining backup and replication in a single product, Veeam's technology enables rapid recovery of a VMware ESX or ESXi environment. With Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0. Veeam has made innovative additions to its product, such as disk deduplication and change block tracking as well as performance improvements as well as a multi-Veeam-Backup reporting/rollup Web tool that provides an overall view of storage systems. Some key features of the technology include the following:
- near-real-time replication by exploiting new vSphere ESX 4 functionality to provide five-minute increments to achieve better recovery point objectives;
- hot virtual machine copy capability to mirror production environments to test lab storage, for datacenter migrations or for ad-hoc backups;
- backup storage space monitoring with alerts for advanced backup storage capacity planning; and
- replica seeding for an initial replication using removable storage to minimize traffic over wide area networks.