Data Center

Product Review: Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise v.8

Software offers near-continuous protection of virtual machines.

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer and public speaker with 20 years of experience covering technology.

Most governments have deployed virtualized environments to quickly provision resources on demand. However, standard backup software is ill suited to protect virtual machines.

Veeam Software designed its Backup & Replication software to safeguard virtualized applications and data. Available in several editions for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, the Veeam products offer near-continuous data protection and streamlined disaster recovery. We tested an enterprise version for VMware with a dozen VMs.

Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise v.8 System Requirements

Platforms: vSphere 4.x, 5.x
OS: All operating systems supported by VMware; a separate version supports Microsoft Hyper-V
Supported Hardware: Recovery can be set to support entire VMs, virtual disks or file-level backups for almost any system
Sockets Required: More than six for enterprise functionality
Licensing: Per CPU socket for one year
CDW-G Price: $1,281.89

Once the software was installed on the ESX host, it offered complete visibility into the infrastructure through a console or remotely through a web client plug-in. We were able to view all backup activity, and also use the SureBackup feature to verify the recoverability of every backup. What’s more, Veeam’s SureReplica feature tests and verifies all system replicas.

Veeam Backup & Replication Aids Database Recovery

Our first test involved breaking a VM that supports several desktop applications. The Veeam software sprung into action at the point of failure and restored everything in just under a minute. A larger test recovered a 200-gigabyte database in just over four minutes. By comparison, it could take hours to restore that amount of data using traditional software to back up physical servers, and there would be no way of knowing for sure if the restore process would work.

Veeam also enables IT managers to set up a virtual lab that mirrors a VM production environment. Testing new programs before deploying on a live network helps administrators prevent any new apps or patches from causing crashes.

The Backup & Replication software gives public sector IT managers peace of mind that their data and applications can be running within minutes after a failure. It’s also an easy way to add the occasionally overlooked virtual infrastructure to a disaster recovery plan, and to guarantee that the VMs can be spun back up and recovered quickly.

Veeam Backup & Replication Safeguards Backup Data

IT managers are rightfully concerned about protecting backup data from intrusion. Hackers may find that attacking backup data is far easier than going after the main network.

Veeam Software offers built-in AES 256-bit encryption to secure data on the host, in flight and at rest. During our testing, the encryption didn’t degrade the performance of backups or restorations. In fact, when compared with the restore times of an unencrypted 200-gigabyte database, the encryption added only fifteen seconds to the overall time, so there is no reason not to protect that data.

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