Hornetsecurity VM Backup (formerly Altaro) is a backup and replication solution for Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines. VM Backup can manage large infrastructures, with the revamped backup repository providing long-term storage and more efficient use of disk space.
$59.80
per VM/per year
Veeam Data Platform
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Veeam’s® premier product, Veeam Backup & Replication™, delivers availability for all cloud, virtual, Kubernetes and physical workloads. Through a management console, the software provides backup, archival, recovery and replication capabilities.
$428
per year per 5 instances
Pricing
Hornetsecurity VM Backup
Veeam Data Platform
Editions & Modules
Subscription License - Standard Edition
$59.80
per VM/per year
Subscription License - Unlimited Edition
$73.80
per VM/per year
Subscription License - Unlimited Plus Edition
$89.20
per VM/per year
Perpetual License - Standard Edition
$595
per host
Perpetual License - Unlimited Edition
$695
per host
Perpetual License - Unlimited Plus Edition
$875
per host
Free
Free
Veeam Data Platform Essentials
$428
per year per 5 instances
Veeam Data Platform
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hornetsecurity VM Backup
Veeam Data Platform
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Veeam sells through channel partners. Contact a partner for detailed pricing and quotes. Resellers or sales personnel are available for assistance.
Each of the products got its own strengths. For me, it is all about the customer, and about their requirements. Altaro is very good software, and I can get protected what I need to for our customers, and that is the most important part.
For some of the products we can say we compare this with Veeam every year, but until today we have no reason to switch over to another product. Veeam is rolled out in our organization and every admin can work with the Veeam products, so there's no need to switch (yet!).
Do you have VMWare? Yes I can back it up. Do you have Hyper-V? Yes I can back it up. That in itself should speak for itself. Altaro has really given a great deal into their software, not only making it easy to use, BUT also a really good and reliable product where you can support your workloads hassle-free, and super lightweight
I have been a Sysadmin for 3 decades and have used all manner of backup software and systems. I'm now at a place where our needs are not all that great, but my experience with other platforms has allowed the company greater flexibility in restores and, more importantly, in testing and quality assurance of our in-house software. As a small company, we have relatively simple needs, and Veeam has met all of our requirements, so I cannot say that they are deficient in any way.
Fast and simple setup. I didn't need to read through ANY documentation to set up and have a backup running.
Easy and cost-effective licensing. I didn't need to count CPU's or VM's or other random facts to work out my licensing. Just how many hosts, and then one of 3 feature levels of which two have unlimited VM licensing. Hosts x Feature Set = Cost.
Easy Restores. Backing up is one thing, but restoring and having confidence in the restore is another. It just works, simple and effective.
Help is easy to find if you need it. From within the app, it gives you options of email, phone, and live chat, which is usually available even with odd time zones in play.
Veeam stands out among backup solutions because of its ability to work with almost any storage type. For example, only a small portion of backup solutions will support catalyst stores, Veeam does.
Veeam is extremely flexible when it comes to setting it up. I had a network recently that limited ethernet connectivity between the Veeam VM and the backup repository and Veeam handled it easily.
Day-to-day use of Veeam is very simple. It is easy to train our technicians to use it proficiently in a very short amount of time.
Our Veeam VMs don't have issues very often, but the one or two times I have called for support, they answered right away, and the technicians assisting us were knowledgeable about their products.
More cloud-based storage options. Currently, only Azure is supported, which is excellent, but it would be good to have AWS and Google storage options too.
It would be AWESOME if they could do a restore from Azure cloud direct to an Azure VM instance. Currently, you need to set up an Azure VM machine with nested Hyper-V, install Altaro on that, and then restore into a nested VM, this gets crazy expensive.
Better notification of errors, or more around having a threshold, so if it misses one backup of a constant backup that happens every 5 minutes but recovers at the 10 minutes back, it is ok. Just think it needs to identify significant or long-running issues better than the occasional little issues.
I have used many other data backup products that are on the market. I trust the configuration options within Veeam to do as they are labeled, without any specific back end software changes that may cause backups to fail if you don't use a systems integrator.
I trust the product for my own home environment as well due to relationship I have with the product at work.
A lot of people in the technical industry deliver what I would call snack crackle pop topics, where the software gets over complicated, and they drown people in all the "fancy" features. Altaro, from my point of view" has designed the software to be super usable, easy to implement, as well as support. It is really one of the best designs
Veeam is fairly simple in terms of how it is set up; its not an overly-complicated dashboard that can be intimidating to less technically-inclined users. Veeam also offers good instructional videos to help users work through how to do specific functions. I appreciate that they have specific video tutorials rather than having users scroll through a cumbersome manual.
I give Veeam Data Platform a rating of 9 for availability because it consistently performs reliably in critical data protection and recovery tasks. The platform is designed to minimize downtime, ensuring that backup and recovery processes are accessible when needed.While there may be rare instances of maintenance or minor application errors, these do not significantly affect the overall reliability of the system. Veeam’s strong architecture and features like high availability configurations further enhance its performance, allowing us to trust it in crucial situations. Overall, it has proven to be a dependable solution that meets our organization's needs effectively.
To identify a bottleneck in the data path, Veeam Backup & Replication detects the component with the maximum workload, the component that works for the most time of the job. For example, you use a low-speed storage device as the backup repository. Even if VM data is retrieved from the SAN storage on the source side and transported over a high-speed link, VM data flow will still be impaired at the backup repository.
One of the most important benefits of the Altaro HyperV backup solution is the support. From the free edition, you're able to chat with the support that can assist you in a remote session an find a quick solution that solves the issue. It is always available. The email support is also.
The support team has never asked me to jump through silly hoops or waste time on pointless exercises. They seem to truly have a handle on what may be wrong. In fact, when we were having trouble getting our license renewal setup (because of yet another license migration at Veeam) a support incident got us connected to the right people to get our renewal done in time.
I rated the in-person training an 8 because it was generally effective and provided a solid foundation for understanding the Veeam Data Platform. The instructors were knowledgeable and engaged, making the sessions interactive. However, I felt that some topics could have been covered in more depth, and additional hands-on exercises would have further reinforced the learning experience. Overall, it was a positive training session that adequately prepared attendees for using the product, but there's room for improvement.
I gave it a rating of 7 because, although the online training offered valuable content and covered the essential aspects of the Veeam Data Platform, it lacked interactivity and opportunities for direct engagement with instructors. This made it challenging to ask questions or delve deeper into specific topics. Additionally, some sections felt a bit rushed, which could hinder a comprehensive understanding of more complex features. Overall, while the training was useful, improvements in interactivity and pacing could elevate the experience significantly.
Plan the process and then work through your plan, i know this should go without saying but its easy to get sidetracked. You tend to want to just get up and running so you can have that sigh of relief, spend the time to talk to your business stakeholder to see what goals they are trying to accomplish and how that may impact your plans first.
The only other competitor I am personally familiar with is Carbonite. I use that for file-level backups throughout my network and it works well but while it does offer backups for virtual machines, I have never found it to be a reliable option. Jobs failed for me regularly for no apparent reason. In the handful of times I have needed support, they were helpful and straight-forward.
Historically, it's been the lowest cost per feature. Easiest to use, lowest cost to maintain, and vast in the things it keeps adding in its feature set. It was just a vmware only backup utility, but now it does baremetal, cloud, NAS (like qnap/synology). Veeam Data Platform which is the monitoring side of it also gives great insights.
In terms of scalability for our company, Veeam was able to cover our backup needs with ease. They have options for even more individualized backup if we were to need them; i.e. if a specific workstation needs its own independent backup. We have not used these resources yet, but I am confident they will be beneficial to our company in the near future.
Restoring our primary ERP VM has already saved many hours of rebuilding from data backups, so that in itself already gave us an excellent ROI for having Altaro running.
The quick and easy setup also makes sense for a fast ROI as we didn't need to spend much time or effort in its set up.
Lastly, any other restores we have done for retrieving files or testing backups were so simple and easy to do that the process didn't take long and saved us time and cost.
