Future (or current) like functionality from VDP Advanced

[daphnis]

Just returned from PEX 2013 where I attended a seminar on the new features of VDP Advanced. While it can't really hold a candle to Veeam B&R, a couple features that it seems to have that Veeam does not (please correct me if I'm wrong) are variable-length deduplication and CBT-leveraged restores. Can anyone comment on if Veeam actually has either of these, or plans to add them in the future?

[tsightler]

Veeam does not use variable-length dedupe as Veeam uses a completely different approach to storing backups, rather than storing backups into a huge pool, our backups are simple files that can be easily copied and archived. Our dedupe is optimized for use with features such as our virtual labs and instant restore.

Of course, you can always leverage Windows 2012 dedupe to store Veeam backups if you would like to take advantage of variable length dedupe across jobs with Veeam. The overall results are very similar with regards to space savings and allow you to get the best of both worlds, per-job, fixed block dedupe that works great with virtual backups and instant restore, were allowing older backups to be deduped with variable-length dedupe for long term space savings.

I certainly have no idea regarding future plans to leverage CBT based restores, it's a "cool" feature, but I've always been a little skeptical of the usefulness of this technology as there are many cases where CBT will simply not be in a consistent state for a restore. It seems that most restore scenarios are after VMs were deleted (no CBT) or after a physical event such as a power loss (when CBT state will be inconsistent). Instant restore is great for these scenarios where CBT based restore wouldn't be very useful. In other words, while I can certainly see some scenarios where CBT restore might be useful, instant restore covers all of these scenarios and more, so I believe it is more useful overall.

[daphnis]

Thanks for your response.