Veeam Courts Enterprises With WAN Acceleration

Data backup vendor Veeam Software this week announced enhancements to its product line that are designed to streamline backup processes in virtual environments.

The introduction of built-in wide area network acceleration and backup snapshots for Hewlett-Packard virtual storage appliances -- both of which will be available as part of Veeam Backup & Replication v7 Enterprise Plus Edition beginning in July -- also could make the company's software more appealing for larger enterprises.

While WAN acceleration itself isn't innovative, it's something that most of Veeam's primary competitors in the SMB market don't offer, Rachel Dines, senior infrastructure analyst at Forrester Research, said during a phone interview. What's more, said Dines, building it in to Veeam's core product could make the company more competitive with larger vendors.

"Even many of the enterprise-focused legacy backup solutions don't offer WAN acceleration embedded in their product," she said.

Veeam, whose technology is designed to provide backup support for companies running VMware's vSphere and Microsoft's Hyper-V, says its built-in WAN acceleration will enable companies to copy data to off-site locations up to 50 times faster than a regular file copy. That prevents having to beef up network bandwidth or purchase separate WAN acceleration appliances.

"Most organizations need to get copies of backups off site," said Dines. "The new feature Veeam is announcing makes that process much more efficient."

Meanwhile, Veeam's new Backup from Storage Snapshots feature, which works with HP's StoreVirtual and StoreServ appliances, is designed to reduce stress on virtual infrastructures by improving recovery point objectives and enabling IT administrators to make backups as often as they want, even for input-output-intensive virtual machines.

Dines said the capability should prove appealing to companies looking to minimize the impact of backup snapshots on virtual host machines.

"A lot of companies are interested in using array-based snapshots to take backups because it allows them to reduce their backup windows to virtually zero," she said. "Many of the traditional enterprise-class backup tools have been doing this for a long time, but Veeam is the first of the hypervisor-based tools to offer this that I know of."

Pricing for Veeam Backup & Replication v7 Enterprise Plus Edition will be $1,999 per socket. Veeam's Standard Edition will be $750 per socket, up from $699 for the previous version, while the Enterprise Edition will cost $1,250 per socket, up from $1,099. Customers of Veeam's existing Enterprise Edition (v6.5) are eligible for a free upgrade to the Enterprise Plus Edition, as are any new customers who purchase Enterprise Edition licenses prior to July 1.