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Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by smile_dav »

Hi everyone,

Just want to know whether there are (or will be) any official comparisons from Veeam or Symantec for these two products?
I know there's Veeam v5 vs Symantec Backup Exec 2010R2, but this is pretty outdated and Veeam v6 has a lot of improvements, so any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance!
David
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by smile_dav »

Anyone have any suggestions/advise...?

Thanks
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Gostev »

Hi, most likely there will be no official comparisons from Veeam vs. any named competitor from now on, because this may incur major legal issues due to recent law changes in some countries that we sell to. Generic comparisons not mentioning specific competitors might be possible (still consulting with our lawyers regarding that). And, of course, you always have an option to discuss Veeam advantages over any competitive solution for any given environment by scheduling a call or on-site visit with one of our engineers. Thanks!
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by smile_dav »

Thanks Gostev, I totally understand the issues regarding this.
Will probably have a conference call with one of the support team guys then.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Gostev »

No problems. Actually I meant a call with our System Engineers, not support.
http://www.veeam.com/register_for_a_live_demo.html
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by J1mbo »

That and the fact that symantec are sueing Veeam, claiming that they've stolen their customers. Of course they fail to mention that the customers have switched because BE is 10x the price (+) and 10x as much bother with it.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by davidb1234 » 2 people like this post

Well Veeam stole me. I was using BE 10, 11, 12, 12.5, 2010 R2, 2010 R3 and each product was GARBAGE. Always having issues. Symantec would always blame someone or something else. I am about to implement Veeam in a couple weeks and I am very excited to be rid of BE finally.

The exchange agent for Backup Exec has literally taken down our fiber channel storage several times because of bugs.... Unacceptable.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Gostev »

OK, so I've been told we now have generic comparison available here > http://go.veeam.com/switch-to-veeam. Sorry, it does require you to register before you can download the comparison. Not my fault :wink:
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by AdRemSoft »

Gostev wrote:Hi, most likely there will be no official comparisons from Veeam vs. any named competitor from now on, because this may incur major legal issues due to recent law changes in some countries that we sell to.
Hi,

Like David, I was looking for comparison between Veeam B&R 6 and Symantec BE 2012 too. And I found this:
http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/e ... .en-us.pdf
So Symantec can do this and Veeam can't?

I would like to have the similar comparison made by Veeam...
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Gostev »

AdRemSoft wrote:So Symantec can do this and Veeam can't?
Well, may be Symantec has bigger purse to pay their lawyers - we do not. The law is in fact working, as we just tried on one other competitor for a start - they had to remove the comparison.

Of course, we do have similar comparisons, but those are internal documents not intended for public distribution - just an internal resource to help our sales understand our strength against specific solutions.

However, don't read the above as "you can never have this type of information from Veeam". If you'd really like to make real comparison with Veeam, our sales representative will be glad to go over that with you, and explain why Veeam might be a better choice while keeping in mind specifics of your environment and your data protection needs... not just by sending some skewed bullet list where half of the bullets are irrelevant to you, and other half is wrong. For example, I can tell you that Symantec document you have linked has multiple false statements, and I will send this link with my comments to our lawyers for further action. To me, this is false advertizement no matter how you look at it - punishable in most countries including US.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by lobo519 »

I can't say that I disagree with their statements of Application recovery.

The whole requirement for a lab and powering on several VM's from a backup to get to an email is a bit much.... Are their any plans to improve this process?
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Gostev » 1 person likes this post

Sure. This has been quite common feedback, and we do listen to our customers.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Daveyd »

lobo519 wrote:I can't say that I disagree with their statements of Application recovery.

The whole requirement for a lab and powering on several VM's from a backup to get to an email is a bit much.... Are their any plans to improve this process?
I agree as well about firing up multiple VMs in a lab just to recover application items. How does Symantec do it? Hopefully Veeam will streamline the process.

I love Veeam and would never willfully go back to Symantec. I was at the Philadelphia Regional VMUG a few weeks ago and a vendor directly across from the Symantec booth said it best..."Symantec is where good software goes to die". :)
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Cokovic » 1 person likes this post

This comparision chart is totally crap. BackupExec has it's benefits for sure but backup for VMs never worked well. They worked but for example i could never get incrementals of VMs to run. Always failed for some curious reasons. And i'm working wirh BackupExec since 2004.

I recently switched one of my customers from Symantec to Veeam and since then everything works like a charm. Using BackupExec only to offload Veeam backups to tape.

Believe it or not. But if you want a working VM backup dont go with Symantec. You won't get happy with it.

If i had to decide i would always choose Veeam again.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by dellock6 » 1 person likes this post

I can only agree with Haris, we use Veeam in our own datacenter and we installed it in the last years at about 30-40 customers with different size, and all of them were complitely satisfied with it. They came from different previous backup software and none of them have a nostalgy for the old one...
Yes, even Veeam has its limits, but there is always space for improvements, and these forums are heavily participated by Veeam guys and we have often seen bugs and feature requests becoming new features in the distributed version really soon.

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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by 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. :D

You can get a free 30 day trial at veeam.com.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by kewnev » 3 people like this post

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.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Gostev »

Thank you for your kind words! Tape support is coming.
I will research the pricing issue with sales management.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by kewnev » 1 person likes this post

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..
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by 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.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by 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?
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Cokovic »

kewnev wrote: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.
kewnev wrote: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 :)
kewnev wrote: 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 ;)
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Gostev »

J1mbo wrote: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.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by kewnev »

J1mbo wrote: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 :mrgreen:
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by kewnev »

Gostev wrote: 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..
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by J1mbo »

Gostev wrote: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 :)
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by Gostev »

J1mbo wrote: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):
kewnev wrote: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.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by J1mbo »

But that really just says it all - tape isn't even cheap. Seriously, this is dead-end technology.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by kewnev »

J1mbo wrote: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.
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Re: Veeam v6 VS Symantec Backup Exec 2012???

Post by kewnev »

Cokovic wrote: 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..!

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