Unitrends and Veeam: Overview

In the first post in this series, I gave my opinion as to why Veeam is talking about  Unitrends now on its web site.  I noted that  Veeam is a company that focuses on selling software to backup only two virtualization platforms while  Unitrends focuses on offering integrated solutions for continuity and backup that include hardware backup appliances, software, and cloud offerings. I recounted that Unitrends and Veeam didn’t really come across each other that often in the past but that as Unitrends has grown we’re increasingly competing against each other.

In this post, I thought I’d lay out the series of articles that I’ll post on the blog that dig deeper between the approaches of the two companies.  The articles planned may be found below. It’s pretty extensive – I created this by simply reading the original Veeam web page regarding Unitrends and calling out topics that would be of interest to me as a buyer continuity and backup.

• Unitrends and Veeam: Single Web Page Summary
• Unitrends and Veeam: Why Veeam Is Talking About Unitrends Now
• Unitrends and Veeam: Overview
• Unitrends and Veeam: Legacy Silliness
• Unitrends and Veeam: Detailed Analyst Ratings
• Unitrends and Veeam: User Interface and Experience
• Unitrends and Veeam: Scalability
• Unitrends and Veeam: Deduplication
• Unitrends and Veeam: Content-Aware Deduplication
• Unitrends and Veeam: Replication and WAN Acceleration/Optimization
• Unitrends and Veeam: Continuity and Availability
• Unitrends Cloud and Veeam Cloud
• Unitrends and Veeam: Recovery Assurance and Verified Protection
• Unitrends and Veeam: Virtual Protection
• Unitrends and Veeam: Deep Virtual Protection
• Unitrends and Veeam: Physical Protection
• Unitrends and Veeam: All-in-One Integration and PBBAs
• Unitrends and Veeam: Pricing

The ordering of this is suggested not only by Veeam’s web page concerning Unitrends but also in a manner in which certain issues build upon others.  For example, deduplication is absolutely essential in a modern continuity and backup system – because what modern systems do is build upon replication and WAN acceleration/optimization systems upon your deduplication system.  If you don’t have an adequate deduplication system, you then have to “re-deduplicate” data.  I think this is the reason that Veeam states that Unitrends doesn’t have “WAN acceleration” and Veeam does – it appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of modern cloud-based deduplication and replication data protection architectures.  Because Unitrends does true inline adaptive deduplication across our storage – as opposed to within a batch backup stream – we don’t have to re-deduplicate for replication to another system or to a cloud.

Note that this list subject to change based on feedback – but what I’ll do is come back to this list and update it with any changes.  As this series of articles is published, I’ll also hyperlink to each from this common spot.  Finally, for those that want a simpler executive summary of this subject, a single summary page comparing Unitrend and Veeam may be found here (it’s also shown in the article list above.)

Let me know if there are other articles that you’d like to see.