Congratulations to Veeam on the v7 release – this one is a game changer!

As a friend of the folks at Veeam, I have been lucky enough to be involved in the preview releases and review process as the product evolved. The v7 release of the Veeam Backup & Replication product is significant, and fantastic!

The product speaks for itself with the features, but there are some key things that really made this one super cool for me. You can click the image below for the full infographic on what is contained as a start:

infographic

Destination: Cloud

Probably one of my favorite things to work with is the cloud targets. There are lots of targets supported with Veeam including Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Azure, Rackspace among many others, and the cool feature is OpenStack support! This is really handy for storing your compressed backup images in a commodity storage location so that you can have a true recover-anywhere scenario.

Using Glacier was my target of choice because of the really low cost to maintain data there, and with the compression levels of my backups it saved a lot of cost to store the content there. Since I’m less concerned about the speed of my target storage, I preferred to build my solution based on low operational cost.

I’ve got a post queuing up on the OpenStack target so stay tuned for much more info on this one.

Filesystems FTW!

For those who are leading the push towards new filesystems, the Microsoft ReFS is fully supported in the newest release, so you can perform file-level recovery in your Windows Server 2012 environment regardless of your deployed filesystem. It runs the gamut on other choices with support for all of the Linux EXT*, XFS and HFS plus other traditional and journaling filesystems.

Speed Boost = Win

My backups were drastically faster with the v7 release thanks to parallel processing. The previous release of Veeam Backup & Replication would serially process backups, so there was some limitation on the amount of content that you could process within a certain window.

I’m using a few different backup products, and the comparative increase in speed was unmatched. From 6.5 to 7.0 there have been changes in compression, WAN acceleration and with the parallel processing, which combined to make a significant bump in the amount of VMs that can be backed up in the time window.

Single pane of awesome

I dread the phrase “single pane of glass”, but this one was a big step in the right direction. The integration with the vSphere Web Client was another really slick features that came with v7. If you aren’t already using the vSphere Web Client, you will inevitably see this become the tool of choice in future. I’d suggest getting used to it now, and then you will find lots of good reasons to use it.

webclient

Having your backup management baked into your virtualization console will be great to give you one less product screen to have to deal with as you do your day to day admin tasks.

Got tape? Not a problem

One of the biggest concern that many organizations have is the storage of long-term backups to tape media. I’ve been working in financial services, insurance services and health care fields for quite a while and I can tell you that tape backups are a necessary evil thanks to legal retention policies.

TapeDrive
Well…maybe this is a bit too “legacy”, but you get the idea

So the addition of being able to use a tape drive as a target was probably one of the biggest features that makes this a game changing upgrade. Storing of backups to offline media gives that extra layer of protection that will make your users, and the auditors very happy 🙂

Trusting your product

I know that we see a lot of marketing slides on products and there are lots to choose from. The products that I support are ones that I know, so I can speak from experience that I trust Veeam from experience.

Trust, to me is defined by deleting your own Active Directory account and recovering from backup. It works. I tried it to confirm. Have you ever tried to do AD account recovery? That can be a horror story for most folks, so just having that option alone was a win for me.

With a lot of upcoming work on SharePoint also, I plan to take a run at the SharePoint object and item level recovery which will be a definite push for using Veeam Backup for the SQL and SharePoint web servers. More to come on that once I can fully test the feature, but in the interim you can talk to great product experts like Rick Vanover (@RickVanover)

This is just a taste of the options available, so the first place you should start is by downloading the product and kicking the tires on it yourself.

You can follow the link to the right of your screen which will help to let them know that Eric from DiscoPosse sent you, and you can always go to www.veeam.com to see the entire product line. Look back here for more cloud goodness with Veeam soon too!

 

 

 

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