Item: Veeam Data Platform
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Veeam Availability Suite is used in our daily DR practice. We are currently protecting over 150TB of data per night at 4 major data centers and 2 remote offices. Veeam revolutionized our backup and DR strategies through ever expanding services in the core product that we continuously leverage. Combined with Veeam Availability Orchestrator, we are able to efficiently replicate, and more importantly, orchestrate recovery of our virtual infrastructure with ease.

Pros and Cons

The scalability of the product allows for use in large and small environments with performance to match the needs of the location.
Simple to use web-based tools can be leveraged by various role based groups within the organization for the all too common requests for data restores and missing files.
Excellent reporting capabilities on what occurred during the backup windows in any given period of time; mostly used for daily backup and replication job status reports that results in less time being spent figuring out if backups worked last night, or not.
The VeeamONE component has a serious set of features that allow you to monitor and report on infrastructure health and performance.
Makes GFS retention policies easy to manage and automate, so that you stay within policy for backup retention.

Legal discovery can be very difficult if you tier off your older, archived backup files to a lower performance storage platform. The more backup data restore points you need for policy requirements, the worse this becomes during a legal discovery because there is no constant log being generated. Even with full indexing turned on, legal discovery is not any less painful.
Improvement could be made to allow for continuous replication of servers, which is supposedly coming in a future release, but has not officially been announced for a release date, yet.
Veeam's MS Azure feature set, while constant improvement are being made, is still mediocre at the current time.

Return on Investment

Without Veeam, we could not have done what we do today for our DR strategy for the cost we have done it. Veeam is inexpensive for what it provides in powerful tools to enable our business to feel confident we are protected in the event of a simple or massive outage.

Alternatives Considered

CommVault, Dell EMC Avamar, Dell EMC Networker, Rubrik, Cohesity and Zerto

Simplicity and cost were the main factors over most of the competition. Others, like Rubrik and Cohesity, just aren't yet at the level of sophistication that Veeam has and it would be very difficult to shift to a new product with our current setup.

Support Rating

Support response can be slow and sometimes tedious if you have a non-generic issue in your environment. Due to my experience with Veeam, I often discover the solutions before support does, but on the rare occasion where I need a higher tier of support, their experience and skill set are excellent. If you truly find something odd in your environment, Veeam Support, Development and their teams of engineers will figure it out and provide custom hot-fixes when necessary.

Key Insights

Do you think Veeam Data Platform delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Veeam Data Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Veeam Data Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Veeam Data Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Veeam Data Platform again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Zerto, VMware Horizon (formerly VMware View), VMware vCenter Server, Microsoft Teams

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a legacy backup infrastructure that simply is not working due to complexity or amount of data that needs to be backed up not being able to be processed within backup windows, then the right setup with Veeam can help. We reduced our nightly backup windows from 16+ hours for just a handful of server, to a nightly footprint of over 70TB being backed up AND replicated off site within half the time. I don't know of any situation where Veeam might not be appropriate, unless you are 100% in the cloud, where there might be other products better suited to protecting your data.

Veeam Availability Suite Review

Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Availability Suite