Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

[vmJoe]

I think the best comparison chart is to install Veeam (free 30 day trial) in your environment and test it. Unlike Symantec, Veeam can run in a VM, and you can set Veeam and have it running about 30 mins.

You'll get a good comparison that way.

You can get a free 30 day trial at veeam.com.

[kewnev]

We have recently switched from BE2012 to Veeam 6.

The reasons we switched:
1. Unreliable backups for a Windows 2000R2 Hyper-V Cluster. We would change nothing, and BE would randomly fail. Tried all the fixes and patches, with only minor improvement. We had BE from 2010 onwards, and this behaviour never improved. They never really placed many resources into improving Hyper-V CSV backups, often giving customers the promise of "we haven't forgotten about Hyper-V customers, improvements around the corner" - these promises were lip service.
2. BE 2012 is buggy, and they didn't listen to their customers. Read this thread for hundreds of complaints from current customers: http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/ ... pexec-2012
3. Very expensive. You need to purchase a separate agent license per SQL database/instance. Very greedy IMHO, why not make it one license per server?

I tried Altaro Hyper-V backup, and found it way too simplistic and limiting. You had to run the Altaro front end on a Hyper-V host, and the product didn't support software compression (their answer to that seems to be "turn on NTFS compression on the backup drive"!!). It was cheap to buy though.

As for Veeam..
- From day one of trialling it, it was been rock solid reliable without any failures. I can even perform a live migration of a VM while it is being backed up, and Veeam will keep working. BE would fail for us in this circumstance.
- It has a simple interface (yet has a lot of technology under the hood). BE is complex. They have tried to fix it with BE2012, but some of the most basic things are still hard to find.
- Licensing is very simple. Whereas BE licensing is complicated.

Veeam doesn't get away scott free though...
- It would be nice if it could write to tape (not a complaint, just a wish)
- I have a feeling they charge Aussie customers more than US customers for the product. In my calculations, it cost around $US320 extra per socket for the Enterprise edition, all up an extra $US2,500 for 8 sockets, just for being Australian! Very unfair IMHO. We couldn't afford this extra hit, so we went for Veeam Standard. I Believe there is going to be a senate inquiry in the parliament about software companies charging Aussies so much more.

[Gostev]

Thank you for your kind words! Tape support is coming.
I will research the pricing issue with sales management.

[kewnev]

Very much looking forward to tape support!
The other thing I forgot to mention that I like about Veeam is the lack of requirement for agents to be installed on the VMs. One less thing to keep updated and to diagnose.
Looking forward to your research findings on the AU pricing too..

[TomBlue]

I'm using Veeam for about 6 month now. It's simple, fast, stable and reliable. But away from any technical issues, you can get in touch with Veeam people:

I started a BE2012 eval days ago because I still need a solution for doing backups with brick level restore. On day 2 of eval I was hit from one of the bugs in their software. At first moment I was happy to find any information about this, but the solution in KB was to load agents from previous version, I do not own. And no chance to find it in download area. So I tried to get in touch with them. After 3 tries I always ended up at a page where I have to enter some contract or case numbers. There is no simple chance to get simple support, even in trial period.

That never would happen with Veeam, I'm sure.

So if you want a rock stable solution, go with Veeam.

[J1mbo]

I'd actually encourage Veeam not to put any kind of tape support in, since once that can has been opened very likely Veeam will gain something of the reputation for poor reliability that has plagued BackupExec and all the other tape backup product vendors. And besides it's totally legacy technology superseded by everything Veeam stands for - shown I think nicely by the tapes on display at Bletchley Park and any other computing museum. It's where they belong.

Instead, for me Veeam should be focusing on supporting encrypted replication of backups to any other removable media, especially USB for the SMB. Personally I solved this using TrueCrypt, scripting and USB 3 drives but of course that's limited to backup sets of 3TB or so at the moment. For anyone interested, the script detects an attached USB drive, attempts to mount it as a TrueCrypt volume, copies the backup files, then dismounts TrueCrypt and then the USB device (and emails an overall job status of course), so that by the time we arrive on a Monday morning the device 'is safe to remove' with everything ready to take offsite.

I don't know if the 'population-wide' dedupe approach of for example TurnKey TKLBAM might offer something for a Veeam cloud solution?

[Cokovic]

We have recently switched from BE2012 to Veeam 6.

The reasons we switched:
1. Unreliable backups for a Windows 2000R2 Hyper-V Cluster. We would change nothing, and BE would randomly fail. Tried all the fixes and patches, with only minor improvement. We had BE from 2010 onwards, and this behaviour never improved. They never really placed many resources into improving Hyper-V CSV backups, often giving customers the promise of "we haven't forgotten about Hyper-V customers, improvements around the corner" - these promises were lip service.
2. BE 2012 is buggy, and they didn't listen to their customers. Read this thread for hundreds of complaints from current customers: http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/ ... pexec-2012

Agree with that. Made the same experience with this product. Instead of trying to get a rock solid product they are just focusing on integrating more and more features getting just more and more errors and an overloaded product.

3. Very expensive. You need to purchase a separate agent license per SQL database/instance. Very greedy IMHO, why not make it one license per server?

Again agree with that. I had to make a decision for one of my customers. And we were in a simmilar situation. Purchase additional licenses from Symantec and renew existing SLAs or take the money and invest it into a new product. Would have been a total of additional 2000€ on costs at Symantec. In the end we've decided go with Veeam as we wouldnt have additional costs as the company grows and we need for example another SQL server. With Symantec this would be again a new license

As for Veeam..
- From day one of trialling it, it was been rock solid reliable without any failures. I can even perform a live migration of a VM while it is being backed up, and Veeam will keep working. BE would fail for us in this circumstance.
- It has a simple interface (yet has a lot of technology under the hood). BE is complex. They have tried to fix it with BE2012, but some of the most basic things are still hard to find.
- Licensing is very simple. Whereas BE licensing is complicated.

I must admit i can only agree with everything you've said. You'll get a like from me for that

[Gostev]

I'd actually encourage Veeam not to put any kind of tape support in, since once that can has been opened very likely Veeam will gain something of the reputation for poor reliability that has plagued BackupExec and all the other tape backup product vendors. And besides it's totally legacy technology superseded by everything Veeam stands for - shown I think nicely by the tapes on display at Bletchley Park and any other computing museum. It's where they belong.

We've ran a big poll about this (disk or tape) among our customers 1 year ago - just blasted our whole email database. It appeared that as many as half of the sockets sold to date belong to customers who want us to support tape. So, we have no choice really but to deliver what they want. I am sure we can deliver tape in reliable manner, just like all other functionality we provide.

I can assure you though that disk and cloud backups will remain our main focus, but we just cannot ignore the requests that are coming from thousands of customers.

By the way, by sheer amount only about 30% customers voted for tape support, as obviously smaller customers do not care about tape support. So, if we did not take socket count into the account, the tape fans group would have "lost" the poll.

[kewnev]

I'd actually encourage Veeam not to put any kind of tape support in [...]
Instead, for me Veeam should be focusing on supporting encrypted replication of backups to any other removable media[....]

I guess everyone has their preferences of the features that should be added. Would be nice if we all wanted the same thing

[kewnev]

We've ran a big poll about this (disk or tape) among our customers 1 year ago - just blasted our whole email database. It appeared that as many as half of the sockets sold to date belong to customers who want us to support tape. So, we have no choice really but to deliver what they want. I am sure we can deliver tape in reliable manner, just like all other functionality we provide.

Yes there is still a large market of tape users. And I can also tell you that a lot of people stick with and put up with poor software such as BE because they want tape support and the alternatives are lacking. If you have invested in quality tape hardware, which isn't cheap, and you trust tape, then it is very hard to switch away from it. I have no doubt that if Veeam added tape support you'd be getting customers switching over in droves..

[J1mbo]

We've ran a big poll about this (disk or tape) among our customers 1 year ago...the tape fans..."lost" the poll.

And how things have changed in a year

[Gostev]

And how things have changed in a year

Little changes for one simple reason (and we've been hearing this over and over from prospects):

If you have invested in quality tape hardware, which isn't cheap, and you trust tape, then it is very hard to switch away from it.

[J1mbo]

But that really just says it all - tape isn't even cheap. Seriously, this is dead-end technology.

[kewnev]

But that really just says it all - tape isn't even cheap. Seriously, this is dead-end technology.

All that matters is that the market still wants it.

Also, the hardware for tape isn't cheap, but the tapes themselves are. Well for LTO-5 it is anyway. You can get a 1.5TB (uncompressed) LTO-5 tape in Australia for around $AU65.

[kewnev]

I must admit i can only agree with everything you've said. You'll get a like from me for that

Thank you sir

Another 100% successful backup. I'm loving it..!