vRanger Pro Rebuttals?

[foreit]

I am a huge fan of Veeam. I've used it in the past and I think its an amazing product. I demo'd vRanger Pro back when I decided to go with Veeam and I was not impressed at all. Recently I have a new oppertunity to use Veeam again. But of course once our Dell rep found out we were looking into backup to disk for VMware solutions, they tried pushing vRanger Pro which they aquired from Quest Software. I basiclly told them I was going to go with Veeam in order to not waste anyones time. They came back with their rebuttals (which I'm sure they have had to come up with because they are lossing so much to Veeam) regarding Veeam's design. Below are their rebuttals. The only one I agree with is having a single pane to backup both virtual and physical servers. It would be nice not to have to manage 2 seperate backup solutions because you just have those pesky physical servers that for various reasons will never reach the virtual world...

"• Veeam sends all data – for backup, replication, and recovery – through a central server. In contrast, vRanger Pro distributes job processing and moves data by optimizing the resources available in the virtual environment, while still allowing central management in a single console.
• Veeam requires a proxy on the source and target hosts for replication which requires its own Windows OS. vRanger provides a Linux based VA, which does not require the end user to purchase any OS licensing.
• Veeam depends on synthetic fully backups, which rewrites new backup data changes into older backup images, risking their integrity and recoverability. vRanger keeps backup images discreet, and never changes them once they’re written to your repository.
• vRanger has a native catalog, which offers fast searching, self pruning storage use, and “right click” restore functionality. Veeam’s catalogue depends on the end user implementing a Microsoft search server, which is known to be a resource hog. (also requires additional OS / hardware dedication)

We’ve had some significant enhancements to the solution in the last 18-24 months including the support for physical windows servers. If you have any physical boxes, vRanger would allow for management of both under a single pane of glass which is something Veeam can’t offer. If anything changes and you want to take a look at vRanger, we would welcome the chance to discuss the solution with you in greater detail."

Thank you,
Veeam Fan!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Marty,

Veeam sends all data – for backup, replication, and recovery – through a central server.

That's simply not true, Veeam has a distributed architecture that allows to optimize the load from the backup/replication jobs across multiple proxy servers.

Veeam requires a proxy on the source and target hosts for replication which requires its own Windows OS

You can re-use any server as a proxy server, so you do not need a dedicated Windows server for that.

Veeam depends on synthetic fully backups, which rewrites new backup data changes into older backup images

That's also false, you do not need to run synthetic fulls, you can do active fulls instead.

Veeam’s catalogue depends on the end user implementing a Microsoft search server, which is known to be a resource hog.

Microsoft Search Server is an optional component and is not required for indexing and searching files in the backup files.

P.S. looks like their sales guys haven't seen Veeam B&R v6.x at all. Hope this helps!

[tsightler]

To me it looks like they haven't seen the entire 6.x series (distributed architecture, no Microsoft Search Server requirement), or the 4.x version for that matter (I'm pretty sure 4.0 introduced the option for forward incremental that doesn't touch old backup files if that's what you want). Not to mention they didn't even touch the coolest stuff about Veeam like Instant Restore, Virtual Labs/Surebackup, Exchange Explorer, Replication Failback, Re-IP etc.

[Gostev]

Optional active full backups is also a feature of version 4.0 (released like 3 years ago).
Looks like just a bunch of lies to me. Or, someone at DELL needs to do their homework.

If you want to have fun with them, ask why you should choose vRanger over AppAssure or NetVault.
These are all DELL backup products which are providing essentially all the same features
And neither one of those can even touch Veeam B&R when it comes to VM backup.

[foreit]

Thanks guys for the feedback. It sounds like the Dell reps need some newer, more relevant rebuttals!

Cheers!