Future of Veeam is Cloudy

[withanh]

I know this has been talked about in the past, but I can't find any relevant threads on this.

Is it in Veeam's roadmap to be able to write to tape?

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Yes.

[withanh]

I know it's kind of a loaded question, is it planned for the next version or a couple of versions down the road? And ball park on time frame (i.e. this year, next year, not for 5 years)?

h

[Gostev]

Cannot tell. Only because no matter what option above I choose when replying to you, the chance of me lying will be about same (seriously). But I hate to lie, and I espectially hate to set wrong expectations to customers. Sorry

[withanh]

That's OK, I understand. I'm just trying to get a feel for when we can expect it. We had a change last year in our IT Executive level and he is leaning us towards tape. Our vendor is leaning us towards Backup Exec and dropping Veeam. If I can show a relatively near-term path for Veeam to natively support writing to tape, it may make it easier to argue that staying with Veeam is the logical choice.

[Gostev]

Tape is not the logical choice though

[Gostev]

I even updated the topic name with some hints about more logical choice
May be not this year, but tape cannot avoid getting mostly killed in the coming years.

[tsightler]

This may be true in the long term, but for companies with long term archival requirements, the cost of cloud based backup is huge. Not only that, but the daily costs of bandwidth to get all of our data into the cloud would cost more than tape. Plus, what happens in 3 years when your cloud vendor goes OOB? How do you address that concern? Have two cloud backup vendors? Cloud may very well be the future for everything, but I'm not buying into it at this point. Right now clouds just seem to be the hype du jour. How do you know how much they'll charge you in five years after your're locked in with them? What will be the cost of "changing clouds"? What happens when the cloud provider looses your data, much like Google loosing 100,000 customers emails? Even Google had to turn to tape in this case. If the ultimate "cloud company" still uses tape, and still needs it, then how can I possibly just rely on the cloud?

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/03/01/ ... ail-scare/

[tsightler]

Another great read on why tape won't be going away:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/18 ... print.html

[withanh]

You make great points Tom, thanks. Our biggest issue with backing up into the cloud is the bandwidth costs which is why we're considering tape. I hadn't even really considered the other things you listed about them going OOB or whatever.

Unfortunately my management is leaning towards one backup solution provider i.e. to use BE for all backups and to drop Veeam completely. I'm building that business case now.

[Gostev]

Tom, you are making perfectly valid points, but note how I never said anything about "public" cloud. Today, this is only good for very small customers for reasons mentioned above. So, I do definitely agree that this is going to be mostly about backups to private cloud in the short-term. In fact, you are doing backup to private cloud today, if I am not mistaken (offsite backup across Atlantic to your remote office infrastructure). By the way, it is our top priority to facilitate such backups down the road by adding relevant features. With some features we have in mind (thanks to your feedback specifically), we are pretty serious about killing tape backup requirement for many of our customers. Although I know you are quite close to getting rid of tape completely today already - am I right? I think you told me this before, if I remember correctly.

Darhl, if this helps you in any way, I can say that "this year" and "next year" options are more likely than "not for 5 years" option.

[tsightler]

And that was pretty much my point anyway, you used the term "cloud" to really not mean "cloud". The whole "private cloud" thing is just a marketing ploy by virtualization companies, especially VMware, to play off the of the "Cloud" computing hype. Somehow the techie's always allow marketing types to tell us what technologies are, and we just accept it even if we know it's not right. Now perhaps VMware will eventually have a "cloud OS", but their current offering is just a virtualization platform. Calling a mud puddle a cloud doesn't make it one, even if it has the potential, but somehow when marketing gets involved mud puddle=cloud and we all accept it as truth.

We have largely eliminated tape from our day-to-day backup operation, but long-term archiving is a separate issue and I'm not sure we'll be able to get away from tape for the foreseeable future in that requirement.

[Gostev]

I concur, we've been brainwashed. I do find myself using these cloud terms all the time now this was not the case just couple of years ago.

[withanh]

I know, it's all marketing. Have you seen the Microsoft commercials where they say "Store your pictures(or whatever) in the cloud" but are referring to accessing your home system remotely? Drives me crazy!

[virtualwatts]

Cloud is all well and good, like the Veeam synchronous replication - fantastic in a rich-nation geo-political scenario. And the pro's/con's have been summarized nicely here.
We are seeing a rise in virtualization from old infrastructure in what used to be called "Third World" countries. In that situation, where the internet is controlled by the government or unstable and access to external networks limited, tape is still an optimum solution for archiving. Looked at satellite streaming but couldn't justify the cost/benefit. So this month we're going to virtualize a tape server and see if we can make it play nice.

And yes Gostev, I took your advice on block analysis for what is inside those incremental backups - also slated for this month. We're going to try an eDiscovery tool.

[Gostev]

Agreed. I am seeing this a lot too in feedback from the field.