Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication
We currently use Veeam Backup & replication to protect two separate, medium-sized VMWare environments. Each environment has in the region of 200 VM's protected. We found Veeam to be efficient and generally straightforward for both taking and managing backups and bring us into compliance for disaster recovery policies in place in the business.
- Protecting (backing up) all our server infrastructures.
- Ease of recovery of data. Especially for user data, it is quick and efficient to recover data when needed.
- Compliance with DR plans.
- Errors are often difficult to diagnose with complex error messages that don't mean much.
- Software updates often cause other issues with storage hardware which then require firmware updates.
- Reporting could be better. We currently use a 3rd party tool to report as the built-in reporting doesn't seem to be too good.
- Positive in compliance with DR and backup/recovery policies.
- Positive ROI although smaller organizations may struggle to justify the cost.
- Positive in terms of man-hours needed for support. Generally speaking, it doesn't need much support, once setup it can often be "forgotten."
We currently have two separate VMWare infrastructures each with around 200 VMs hosted. Although these numbers do fluctuate, the actual VM numbers don't change by much. The big difference since purchasing the product has been the increase in the amount of data we now backup which has almost doubled. This has been due to the implementation of new systems as well as organic growth of data which is seen in most systems. We have no trouble adding extra storage into the Veeam backup infrastructure and no issues with the increased amount of data being backed up.
We haven't used Veeam for our cloud infrastructure backups due to a cost constraint. When we were first interested in using it for our Office365 corporate environment, there was no additional cost however Veeam then changed this policy. The cost quoted was excessive so the business decision was to use a different product for this, unfortunately. From my sys-admin role view, it would have been better to keep everything in the same place.
We do use the copy function with our backups. This is to provide additional data security by copying the data to a separate location when the primary backups are stored. These copies have also been used in the past for sandbox and DR testing.
I've also used a cloud-based backup system written by Datasoft however this was a low-volume system designed for single servers or desktops. As for Backup Exec, I much prefer Veeam for the user interface and the ease of management. BE always seemed to take a lot of time to maintain and would often have issues after working for months without.