EMC Avamar vs. Veeam 9

[mkretzer]

Hello,

is there a feature comparison between EMC Avamar and Veeam 9 somewhere (i did not find anything up2date)?

Markus

[PTide]

Hi,

Are you interested in some particular features?

Thank you.

[mkretzer]

Thats the thing.. No. I need to know if Veeam featureset is now comparable to EMC or even better.

[PTide]

Well, as far as I know, currently there is no such featureset comparison. Each feature has its application and the efficiency of a feature depends on the environment and goals that you are after. What Avamar edition are you referring to? As far as I understood it is EMC Avamar Virtual Edition, as it won't make much sense to compare backup appliance with a standalone software (Veeam) that can be installed on any system of your choice, is that correct?

Thank you.

[mkretzer]

Yes i think VE is the equivalent to Veeam?

[mkretzer]

I just found out VE is limited to 4 TB so the only comparable products are the appliances...

[PTide]

I just found out VE is limited to 4 TB

True.

I just found out VE is limited to 4 TB so the only comparable products are the appliances...

Well, Veeam is not restricted to use some particular storage as a repository - you can place your backup wherever you want. VBR also offers an integration with dedupe-appliances (including EMC DataDomain) and provides an ability to backup from a storage snapshot. Also there are many other features that provide additional management and maintenance flexibility. I'd really appreciate if you could provide some details about your goals so I can be more specific in my description.

Thank you.

[Gostev]

I need to know if Veeam featureset is now comparable to EMC or even better.

I doubt it is, as it was never our goal to have our feature set comparable to Avamar but answering your question - no, we do not have such a comparison (and why would you trust a comparison coming from the vendor itself anyway).

But if you tell us your specific needs, then we can certainly provide you with information how Veeam can address them.

[Zew]

I'm gonna throw in my 2 cents here, this is my experience with both EMC and Veeam as a whole, not feature sets or otherwise.

EMC support is hands down the worst! I had to have a back n forth about EMC's ability to do VAAI with VMware hypervisors. After arguing with them that it did indeed need a plug-in from their end they finally sent me a link it to (with little to no information on how to install it) after a decent amount of googling I found out everything I needed to know, but found that it wouldn't offload the work to the SAN while the VM's were powered on. Once again I went back to EMC support and had to argue back n forth for 2 weeks until my colleague managed to find a NFS VMware best practice guide which clearly stated that Storage Array process offloading with Storage VMotion would work only while a VM is off, it reverts to using VMkernel Storage Mover when the VM is on. Something a tier 2-1 Storage engineer should be more than well aware of... Their community form is just meh, and I find it difficult to grab any file form them, there SSO login constantly breaks when I try to use it. so that's another whole thing.

So when it comes to Veeam on the other hand, I LOVE the support (not outsourced) this is #1 for me. Literally.
Also as you can tell right from here, a good fourm community.
The updates are well, and thoroughly tested; Veeam 9 release (even though I was still waiting for reviews) was amazing sleek to deploy.
Veeam listens! This is another huge one for me, when I provide detailed steps for a KB that needs to be tweaked, I see it get updated.

So these reasons alone I would never pick EMC over Veeam. (If Veeam had a hardware line I'd probably check it out (SANs, Hypervised hosts, etc)).

[emachabert]

If you think of EMC VBA, my only advice would be to stay away from this product. Not to mention you have to own Datadomain arrays to use all the features.
I don't know any happy customer with VBA.

[cpfleger]

Just a few features where I'd say Veeam's offering unique functionality or simply much more:

- replication feature included (not just backup)
- hw can be choosen freely
- works flawless both virtual and bare metal
- easy scaleable w/o limits
- really leverages backup storage capacity (not just two thirds of nominal capacity)
- Instant VM recovery since 2010
- backup and replica restore proofing w. SureBackup/-Replica
- On demand Sandbox for patch/update testing, dev and test environments (w. StorageSnapshots for some storages HPE/Ntap/EMC)


- agentless backup, replication and restore
- easy granular restore with Veeam Explorer for MS applications and Oracle (Windows-/Linux-VM, Oracle 11 or newer), U-AIR for others (incl. older Oracle versions < 11)
- Tape integration
- WAN optimization (seeding, compression, dedup) included, real WAN acceleration as an option
- builtin Veeam Cloud Connect to put backups/replicas offsite to cloud service provider of customers choice

- restore not just delegateable for application owners but also being able to be delegated for granular restore of some applications or in general to helpdesk for files/folders/systems

- expandable w. comprehensive Veeam management tools (Management Pack for MS SCOM or ONE) offering not just deep insights, alerting and reporting for backup but also for the virtual environment


But maybe the best points for both admins and management are:
- easy to install, to deploy components and to manage
- no vendor-to-print-money-license model as backup data, vm number and other typical growing metrics are not relevant but just the number of physical CPU sockets in the hosts to be protected
- detailed reporting for internal usage and also for documentation (CxO, audits, capacity planing, resource usage addressing etc.)

Just my two cents ...
Regards!

[albertwt]

Yes, I agree, so far I've been never happier with Veeam as I was before with EMC Avamar and EMC Networker
Life has been much less stressful with Veeam software.

EMC i must admit only good in storage hardware base. But then again, when I moved on to different company using PureStorage All Flash Array, it is even better than the previous EMC Storage array that I managed before.
Note, I've been using Veeam Software for 4 years and EMC software & Hardware for about 3 years 9 months.

[mkretzer]

Thanks for your responses!
I am a BIG fan of Veeam - but when i wanted to keep an open mind as we were discussing different solutions internally.