ExaGrid Expands Support For Veeam Backup And Replication

ExaGrid Systems Inc., which makes a disk-based backup and disaster recovery appliance that includes deduplication and replication functionality, has enhanced its product to offer support for the Veeam Backup & Replication product, which provides backup and recovery software intended for VMware virtual environments. ExaGrid provides support for Veeam Backup & Replication v5, including features such as Instant VM Recovery, U-AIR (Universal Application-Item Recovery), and SureBackup Recovery Verification.

In addition to providing fast backups and efficient data storage, support for Veeam also means that users are able to recover a virtual machine (VM), individual application objects, and individual files from the same image-based backup. The functionality will be shipped free to existing users of the product.

"To say I'm excited is an understatement," says Paul Martin, information technology manager for Poulin Grain Inc., a Newport, Vt., family-owned manufacturer of feed for animals ranging from horses to ostriches. The company, which employs around a hundred people, had been using ExaGrid. It then began using Veeam last August with its servers, which run business applications such as enterprise resource planning, SQL Server, email, office suites, file and print servers, website hosting, and online ordering, as well as supporting the company's two remote offices, he said.

While he had been disappointed to learn that ExaGrid wasn't yet supporting Veeam, he had gone ahead and started using it because he felt comfortable knowing the support would be coming, he says. "They were two perfect vendors that didn't fit together very well yet."

The ExaGrid appliance had supported Veeam in a limited fashion before the announcement, previously users could run backups to the device but couldn't run the dedupe or replication functions, said Marc Crespi, vice president of product management for ExaGrid. Now, users can send Veeam backups to the ExaGrid appliance for the purpose of storing them and replicating them to offsite locations, he says. Because Veeam now offers an instant VM restore by keeping an unduplicated copy of the previous night's backup on the ExaGrid appliance, IT administrators can restore users from that backup rather than performing a traditional recovery, which offers improved performance, Crespi said.The announcement makes a lot of sense and takes advantage of the synergy the companies share by having complementary technologies and targeting a similar audience, says Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. Deduplication is an asset in server virtualization environments, because there is a lot of redundancy between virtual machines, and Veeam does an efficient job of capturing and transferring VM images for backup and recovery purposes, she says. Combined with Exagrid, Veeam upped the ante on optimization, making the deal a win-win for users, she says.

Support for Veeam is expected to be available later this month as a free software upgrade to users with existing support contracts. The disk backup system, which includes both source-side and "zone" deduplication, is intended to meet the needs of companies backing up between 1 TB and 100 TB of data of data.

See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Strategy: Deduplication for Disaster Recovery (subscription required).