Are you Outside of Veeam’s Sweet Spot?

I work many computer trade shows each year and get to talk directly to attending IT professionals. Needless to say, I enjoy interacting with Unitrends customers because it allows me to ask them what they think of the many product features we offer. I also get to hear war stories, some the incredibly stupid things their co-workers do to their data, and how Unitrends makes their work life easier.

What is trickier is talking to non-users. Early in the conversation I generally ask what data protection product they are using and if they are happy with it. For those that tell me they are using Veeam the answer to my happiness query is almost a 50-50 split.

What I have found is that those who are happy with Veeam and have no wish to change their backup solution are users that fall directly in the Veeam sweet spot – highly or totally virtualized servers, using primarily or only VMware, single or maybe two locations, with no cloud protection requirements.

This is not a surprise. They don’t even offer their own cloud solution. Veeam was developed for virtualized datacenters running VMware. It is even in their name – Veeam was chosen as it is one way of pronouncing “VM” for virtualized machines. This has been their focus since their founding in 2006 and, give them credit where credit is due, they have gotten very good at it. So much so I generally don’t waste time trying to convince happy Veeam customers that they should switch.

On the flip side, those that report that they have issues with Veeam almost always have a more complex, heterogeneous environment – larger datacenters with physical servers, hyperconverged infrastructure, multiple locations with some that need remote management, legacy applications or operating systems, and most of all requirements for cloud protection options. Larger data centers don’t like that they have to deploy many Windows servers to handle their Veeam deployment, making themselves even more of a ransomware target.

Managing complexity is Unitrends’ sweet spot. The reason we have so many happy customers is because we are the best at protecting complex and challenging environments. Unitrends was the first to introduce bare metal restores, a disk-based backup appliance, high-density tiered backup, and integrated automation and orchestration for testing, failover and failback. We were the first to introduce cloud offerings with a 1-HR DRaaS SLA, “Pilot Light” for public cloud (the ability to move cold storage into the active cloud and spin it up in native cloud format for failover), Forever Cloud with infinite retention, and Tiered DRaaS SLAs. Unlike Veeam, Unitrends manages its own purpose-built disaster recovery cloud. Unitrends’ focus has always been to meet the broad data protection and recovery needs of complex organizations.

Please don’t get me wrong – Unitrends is also good at protecting smaller VMware virtualized data centers just like Veeam. After all VMware has been around for over 20 years so most data protection companies have had the opportunity to refine how they backup and protect less-complex, highly virtualized environments.

But if you are at all out of the “Veeam sweet spot” with legacy devices such as physical servers, multiple locations, and /or one day want to use the cloud as a component of your data protection and recovery strategy then please talk to us. We have a great collection of technologies that will simplify your IT life. We have a White Paper that goes into greater detail about the technology differences between Unitrends and Veeam and you can get it here.

So if you are at an IT trade show and see the Unitrends booth please don’t avert your eyes and try to slip by. Talk to me about your experiences and most importantly, your plans for future growth. Even if you are currently a happy Veeam user I would like to meet you and you can still enter our booth drawings for Amazon Gift Cards. After all, your data protection requirements may evolve outside of Veeam’s sweet spot and you could become one of Unitrends’ 30,000 customers.

MARKET-LEADING BACKUP AND RECOVERY SOLUTIONS

Discover how Unitrends can help protect your organization's sensitive data