Backup Speed Increases by 98 Percent at
Leading UK Pension Organization

The Business Challenge
The IT infrastructure at The Pensions Trust is 95 percent virtualized. There were nearly 35 physical servers before the VMware consolidation began, and now there are six. Four of them host 35 virtual servers, and the other two host 60 virtual desktops. With so many “eggs” in relatively few “baskets,” ensuring consistent, reliable backups of the virtual environment is especially important. Darren Bull, Business Support Manager for The Pensions Trust, and his team implemented a first-generation backup and recovery tool for the virtual servers that appeared to work for a while. “Then each revision of the product deteriorated,” he explained. “That meant we were constantly monitoring backups because they failed continually, which took a tremendous amount of extra time—both at work and into the evenings. I had to log on from home every night to check backups because they were always failing.”

The Veeam Solution
Darren and his team chose Veeam Backup & Replication to replace the previous product. “Veeam is totally brilliant,” he explained. “To start, it’s much faster than what we used to use. I can back up the 800 GB main !le server in 10 minutes; the other backup system took eight to nine hours to do the same job, if it worked at all.” While backup speed is important to Darren and his team, reliability is even more important. “I simply cannot believe how much di”erence there is between the two products, especially with regard to reliability. I used to spend countless hours monitoring and manually troubleshooting the old system because it continually failed. However, now that we use Veeam Backup & Replication, we all feel like a huge weight has been lifted.” Veeam Backup & Replication also requires less backup storage space than the previous product. “There was no ‘self-cleaning’ with the other product, which meant we had to clean down the !le system each week—a process that could take seven to eight hours—and we could only do this on a Sunday when no backups ran,” Darren said. “Not only was this a laborious process, but it hardly freed up any space. Veeam uses almost half the space (55 percent compared to 98 percent with the other product), and no manual intervention is required. That’s a massive di”erence.” Another major di”erence between Veeam Backup & Replication and the previous product is customer support. “Veeam is a breath of fresh air,” Darren said. “I !nd Veeam support to be very helpful because people actually answer my questions and don’t tell me to wait for the next version. I also like the Veeam forums, which include many contented customers because they did exactly what we did: they made the switch to Veeam.”

The Results
Increases backup speed by 98 percent – With Veeam Backup & Replication, Darren and his team can back up the main file server (800 GB) in 10 minutes. It used to take eight to nine hours with the previous backup product.

Ensures consistent and reliable backups – The IT team used to spend countless hours monitoring and manually troubleshooting the previous backup product because it continually failed. This included nights and weekends. Now that the team uses Veeam Backup & Replication, they feel like a huge weight has been lifted.

Requires much less space for backup storage – Veeam Backup & Replication uses almost half the backup storage space (55 percent) compared to the previous product (98 percent).

Veeam Software, a premier-level VMware Technology Alliance Partner and member of the VMware Ready Management program, provides innovative software for managing VMware vSphere 4 and Virtual Infrastructure 3. Veeam o”ers an award-winning suite of tools to assist the VMware administrator, including #1 for VMware backup: Veeam Backup & Replication; Veeam Reporter Enterprise, for VMware performance, storage, capacity reporting and chargeback; Veeam Monitor, for VMware performance monitoring and alerting across multiple vCenters; and Veeam Business View, a free add-on that works with other Veeam products to provide business categorization for the VMware vSphere environment. With its acquisition of nworks, Veeam’s products include the nworks Smart Plug-in and the nworks Management Pack that incorporate VMware data into enterprise management consoles from HP and Microsoft. Learn more about Veeam Software by visiting Alliance Technology Partners, a Veeam Gold ProPartner

Free upgrade to Veeam Management Suite Plus

Customers who buy Veeam Management Suite before the end of September are automatically entitled to a free upgrade to Veeam Management Suite Plus. That’s a 20% discount on Management Suite Plus!

Duration: July 19 through Sept. 30, 2010

• Save on the individual price of each product when buying the Management Suite
• Realize the promise of virtualization with a full management solution suite for VMware
• Save even more with a free upgrade to Management Suite Plus (including the Enterprise Edition of Veeam Backup & Replication)
  - Instant VM recovery
  - U-AIR (universal application-item recovery)
  - Automated recovery verification

Veeam Management Suite

Alliance Technology Partners is a Veeam Gold ProPartner.  We have the experts to help find the best solution for your company’s needs.  Call our Virtualization hotline at 888-891-8885, option 1.

Alliance Technology Partners is now offering an expanded inventory of HP Renew Proliant Servers, Desktops, Laptops, Workstations, and Procurve Networking products. SAVE an average of 30-50%!

Alliance Technology Partners is a leading reseller of HP Factory Refurbished products including Refurbished Proliant Servers, Refurbished Procurve Networking Products, Refurbished HP Notebooks, Refurbished HP Computers, Refurbished HP Workstations, and more! In addition, Alliance is Gold ProPartner for Veeam Software. Alliance sells the entire Veeam Product Line including Veeam Backup and Replication, Veeam Reporter Enterprise, Veeam Essentials, Veeam Monitor, Veeam Management Pack for VMware, Veeam Management Suite, Veeam nworks Smart Plug-in for VMware 5.0, and More. Alliance also specializes in web security with the Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner.

See our inventory of HP Refurbished Proliant Servers, Notebooks, and Computers

VEEAM ANNOUNCES SUPPORT FOR VMWARE VSPHERE 4.1

Veeam Monitor 5.0 first to support and leverage new vSphere 4.1 features

Columbus, Ohio, July 13, 2010 – Veeam Software, innovative provider of data protection, disaster recovery and systems management solutions for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today announced support for VMware vSphere 4.1. The first Veeam product to leverage the new functionality in vSphere 4.1 is Veeam Monitor 5.0, an easy-to-deploy, framework-independent solution for real-time monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning of VMware environments. A beta version of Monitor 5.0 is available today for download.  All commercial Veeam products will support vSphere 4.1 this quarter.

“We truly value our relationship with VMware and are pleased to support their newest release,” explained Ratmir Timashev, Veeam President and CEO.  “It’s exceedingly important to Veeam and to our customers that we remain on the forefront of VMware innovation.”

vSphere 4.1 includes several enhancements of particular interest to Veeam customers. “Many of our customers have VMs on NFS shared storage,” said Doug Hazelman, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam. “They’ve been asking for more statistics on NFS and will be pleased that this data is in now available in the vSphere API and, by extension, in Veeam Monitor. NFS is no longer a ‘black box’ or something they have to monitor separately.

“Memory compression is another area that customers tell us they’re excited about,” Hazelman continued. “And with Monitor 5.0, they can quantify and document the savings they achieve with memory compression on ESX(i) hosts and individual VMs.”

Key Features
Key features in Monitor 5.0 include:

• Full support for vSphere 4.1: Not only is Monitor 5.0 compatible with vSphere 4.1, it also makes use of the new performance metrics in vSphere 4.1 and monitors new vSphere 4.1 capabilities such as memory compression.
• Built-in intelligence: Monitor 5.0 provides more than 100 pre-defined thresholds and alarms to alert VMware administrators of potential performance problems. It also includes a comprehensive knowledge base that explains each alarm, with possible causes, suggested resolution and links to external sources of additional information.
• Dashboards: Monitor 5.0 includes a dashboard for each object in the virtual infrastructure tree, proving an at-a-glance view of the most useful information for any object, with easy drilldown to more detailed information, as required.
• Other new features include monitoring of logical disk space, snapshot monitoring and Infrastructure Overview reports that provide management-level reports for any part of the virtual infrastructure. Monitor 5.0 also includes streamlined alarm management, enhanced scalability and architecture improvements.

Pricing and Availability
The beta version of Veeam Monitor 5.0 is available immediately for download. A trial license key is required and is provided at no charge. The software will be generally available this quarter, with North American MSRP unchanged at $250 per socket. A free version of Monitor is also available. For more information or to download the beta, go to http://www.veeam.com/go/monitor-50.

About Veeam Software
Veeam Software, a premier-level VMware Technology Alliance Partner and member of the VMware Ready Management program, provides innovative software for managing VMware vSphere 4 and VMware Infrastructure 3. Veeam offers an award-winning suite of tools to assist the VMware administrator, including #1 for VMware backup: Veeam Backup & Replication™; Veeam Reporter™, for enterprise reporting, change management and capacity planning for VMware; Veeam Monitor, for VMware performance monitoring and alertingacross multiple vCenters; and Veeam Business View™, a free add-on that works with other Veeam products to provide business categorization for the VMware environment. With its acquisition of nworks, Veeam’s products include the nworks Management Pack™ and the nworks Smart Plug-in™, which incorporate VMware data into enterprise management consoles from Microsoft and HP.  Learn more about Veeam Software by visiting www.veeam.com.

Virtualization specialist Veeam claims to have cracked a major obstacle to image level backup within virtualization environments, a problem that so far has raised questions about the integrity of virtual machines.

The new technology, SureBackup, has been developed to deal with the problem that backups by themselves are not always accurate. The company points out that even after a successful back, there’s no guarantee that the operating system and applications will start without errors without testing and verify the recoverability of every backup – a horrendously expensive and time-consuming task.

Veeam claims that it has now solved this challenge. Doug Hazelman, director, global systems engineer Group at Veeam said that the problem was one faced by all administrators. “It’s called crash consistent recovery- we’re taking the image of a powered-off system and it has to be powered back on but each time, we’re taking a snapshot of the backup and there’s no guarantee that every backup will be accurate.”

The company uses proprietary technology that, for the first time, allows a virtual machine to run direct from a compressed backup. By publishing the content of backup files direct to ESX hosts, Veeam said that it eliminated the need to extract backup files, and the time and storage required to do so. Hazelman said that the technology would work for any application that runs under VMware. “We’re entirely application and operating system-agnostic,” said Hazelman. “It works because we look at each virtual machine as an image, previously, you had to bring up data, now the entire server can be rendered as an image.

The company stressed that it was not talking about products but a new technology. “The products won’t be available until the second quarter of this year.” said Hazelman, “we wanted to release information about the technology well in advance to ensure that everyone understood it,” he added.

“Historically, backup archive validation has provided assurances of backup archive file integrity, but not of the applications and data contained within the archive,” said Chris Wolf, senior analyst, Burton Group. “Virtualization provides a gateway for innovative solutions to include validation of entire application stacks as part of the backup process. IT professionals no longer have to lose sleep wondering if critical data can be recovered, when they can leverage innovative solutions that validate the application integrity of each backup job.”

See full Article – http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/032310-veeam-claims-to-have-cracked.html

Veeam SureBackup Posted By Texiwill on March 23, 2010

Veeam has introduced a new technology named SureBackup. SureBackup is designed to not only use Veeam’s Backup technology to backup your virtual machines (VMs) but will also test the restoration of each of these VMs to ensure that they at least boot and at most the applications involved are actually running within the VM. This is a great improvement over current backup methodologies which consists of by hand testing of only a scant number of virtual machines to ensure restorations result in boot-able virtual machines. The full test of restorability almost always happens during a disaster situation when everyone is under a fair amount of pressure. The current backup and restoration testing follows this path: •Quiesce the virtual disk employing VSS or other technologies •Backup the virtual disk•Copy the virtual disk to offline storage (tape, blu-ray, dvd, hot-site, remote disk array, etc.) •Choose some of the VMs for by hand restoration (perhaps rotating through all VMs eventually) •Restore chosen VMs into a testing pool (by hand) •Verify that the chosen VMs boot (by hand) •Verify that the chosen VMs applications work (by hand) What is interesting is that the last 3 steps often do not happen and per backup schedule do not test ALL the virtual machines, instead a select number of them. However, this situation now changes. These last three steps may also have an additional license cost if running Microsoft Windows operating systems as the Microsoft EULA is based on running instance of the operating system which includes any restoration testing performed by hand or process. Introducing Veeam SureBackup Veeam Surebackup takes those last three steps and automates them so that every VMs restoration is tested. How much testing depends entirely on how SureBackup is configured. You can easily test to ensure all VMs restore and boot out of the box. You can also verify the integrity of certain applications out of the box. You can also add your own scripts to SureBackup to test other non-standard applications as well. Since this is an automated task, human error is no longer an issue, the process is repeatable, and best yet, all VMs are tested to ensure restoration happens properly before you need it, preventing issues during the high pressured disaster recovery situation. Veeam SureBackup can restore VMs on local systems, hot-site systems, or dedicated systems. VMs are restored into private virtual networks within specific resource pools so that your systems can be configured to lower the overall impact of restoration testing. Backups take quite a while when you have 1000s of VMs, so incrementatl backups and Change Block Tracking is available to reduce this time. Backup takes quite a bit of disk space so data and disk de-duplication can be used. Restoration testing takes personal and system resources to complete, now SureBackup can alleviate much of these resource utilizations but not licensing issues.

For More Information about Veeam Backup and Replication or to Buy Veeam.  Go to www.alliancetechpartners.com