Not a Product, Not Possible, But Available This Summer

SureBackup from Veeam Software is not just another product--in fact, it's not a product at all, it's a set of features to help the reliability of your backups, and it is embedded in version 5.0 of Veeam Backup & Replication, which is slated to debut this summer.

Here's another non-traditional thing about SureBackup, according to Doug Hazelman, Veeam's director, Global Systems Engineering Group: "Customers don't know they want it." And why is that, we inquired? "They didn't think it was possible, but virtualization has pioneered the capability of image-level backups," he replies. It is, Hazelman adds with a conspiratorial pause, "a dirty little secret."

Until now, that is.

As he goes on to explain, even though virtualization and the advent of image-level backups have brought many changes, one problem remains: Just because a backup job completes successfully does not mean the machine can be recovered and booted. Even if the integrity of the backup file is verified, there is no assurance that the OS and apps will start without errors, or that data will be intact.

The problem is, Veeam maintains, there are many possible issues, both procedural and configuration-related, that can interfere. The only way to be completely certain is to test and verify the recoverability of every backup, which, until now, was too expensive and time-consuming to be feasible.

Enter Veeam SureBackup, which eliminates these long-standing barriers while bringing certainty to image-level backups.
Not only has Veeam found the seemingly unfindable formula for sure backups, but it has also found one that is said to make it possible to verify the recoverability of every backup in a matter of minutes. As a result, says Veeam, while organizations are able to  "embrace  image-level backups to improve recovery time and recovery objectives, they are also able to comply more fully with 'reasonable measures,' as required by internal and external regulations, such as HIPAA and SOX."

The secret to this solution is technology that allows VMs to run directly from compressed backups. By publishing the content of backup files directly to WMware ESX hosts, Veeam says, the need to extract backup files and the time and storage consumed by them, is eliminated.

It all sounds good, and Veeam got some pretty good analysts to provide supportive quotes, so it would seem that the only remaining challenge is getting the word out ASAP.

As Hazelman puts it, "This is going to take some time for the market to absorb because it is so different."

Question: Do you think Veeam is on to something here?

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/24/2010 at 12:48 PM