Item: Veeam Data Platform
Rating: 9
Author: John Poh

Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Data Platform

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Veeam Data Platform serves our need for maintaining backups of our systems and facilitating the recovery of those systems should a Disaster Recovery situation arise. The wide variety of recovery options allows us to recover full systems down to individual files that a user accidentally deletes or becomes corrupted.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Elastic recovery to recover only what is needed whether it's a single file or a full system/servers
Allow for immutable storage
Integration with virtual platforms and some SAN providers directly

Cons

Allow for a Backup and Replication to occur in one job
Allow for further flexibility with data retention such as allowing some servers in a job different retention than others or changing in retention over time. Example is backup daily for 7 days, then store a weekly backup for 8 weeks, monthly backup for 13 months, etc. all within the job.
More communication about platform updates. Many new features come out and we are not aware until a little further down the road.

Workloads

Virtualized workloads
Endpoints and physical servers running Windows & Linux
In addition to back up, we also replicate some of these workloads
In addition to back up, we also snapshot some of these workloads

Future Workloads

Enterprise applications such as Oracle or SAP HANA
Cloud-hosted VMs within AWS or Azure

Key Features

Application-centric recovery using Veeam Explorers (for Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, etc)
License portability as your environment needs change
Utilizing backup copies for secondary purposes via DataLabs
Automating test restores to validate recoverability
Immutable storage to protect against ransomware
“Instant” recovery or portability between platforms (physical > virtual > cloud-hosted)
Failover or recovery scripts/plans for orchestrated recovery

Most Used

Immutable storage to protect against ransomware

Number of Workloads Protected

All datacenter level systems are protected by Veeam Data Platform. Workstations are not as we do not store any information on them worth backing up/restoring. This is in line with our expectations.

Return on Investment

Positive in saving employee work hours to be spent on other projects/initiatives
Positive in recovery time compared to previous solutions resulting in less downtime

Needs Assesment

Slow recovery times on the previous solution and quick growth in the company drove for this change. Our recovery operations were greatly improved with the move to Veeam Data Platform.

Cloud Capabilities

We do not currently have many workloads in the cloud, but the platform does give us the feeling that as solutions would move in that direction that we will be able to maintain backup and recovery expectations without any issues. We have recently moved to MS365 exchange and know that Veeam Data Platform will be able to take over these backup operations once we are ready to move off our current solution.

NAS Backup

Our organization has not utilized this feature at this point in time.

Alternatives Considered

Barracuda Backup

Veeam is a more enterprise feature rich platform. It offers further flexibility and additional features such as virtual labs to test backups in an isolated protected method. Veeam has also been more reliable when it comes to backup and recovery speeds and has built in integration with many platforms and storage providers.

Key Insights

Do you think Veeam Data Platform delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Veeam Data Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Veeam Data Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Veeam Data Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Veeam Data Platform again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Oracle Database, HPE Nimble Storage, Microsoft 365

Likelihood to Recommend

I think Veeam Data Platform is a great platform for almost all businesses. The only businesses that I would not recommend it for are small businesses that may not have an IT staff to manage the solution or don't have enough infrastructure to justify the expense of an Enterprise grade solution. In those cases I would recommend either a managed solution or a simple backup solution.

Veeam Data Platform Feature Ratings

Using Veeam Data Platform

Users and Roles

4 - IT

Support Headcount Required

1 - General system administrator position is all we have needed. No need for a dedicated employee as maintenance and upkeep is not very time intensive.

Business Processes Supported

File Recovery
Backup Data Integrity Checking
Regulatory Compliance

Innovative Uses

Utilize Virtual Labs to test software upgrades
Break and restore data while testing applications

Future Planned Uses

MS365 backups

Likelihood to Renew

Veeam is a very strong platform and has made its mark as a must have software if you have on-premise systems or need to have on-premise backups of cloud systems

Evaluating Veeam Data Platform and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - Barracuda Backup. The solution was fairly neglected by previous sys admins and was very limited in its ability to effectively backup and restore systems within a reasonable amount of time.

Key Differentiators

Scalability
Integration with Other Systems
Ease of Use

Integration with other systems. Veeam made it very easy to integrate with HPE Nimble storage and our VMWare environment.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

No changes

Integrating Veeam Data Platform

Ease of Integration

Integrations have been very simple

Systems Integrated With

HPE Nimble
VMware vCenter

VMware vCenter integration was used to backup all VMs and was very easy to setup as it is a preferred integration for Veeam. HPE nimble was used for integration with the native SAN snapshots. The integration was ready to configure and was as full featured as our primary backups.