Unitrends and Veeam: Recovery Assurance and Verified Protection

Unitrends is the only company in the industry that offers recovery assurance (what Veeam calls verified protection) for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and physical/virtual Windows servers and clients.  Unitrends is the only company in the world offering recovery assurance in its own cloud – Unitrends Cloud.

When Veeam decided to “advertise” against Unitrends on its web site, the company called out “Verified Protection” (what Unitrends and the rest of the industry calls “Recovery Assurance”) as a core differentiator against Unitrends.  Specifically, what Veeam stated on the section of its web site that it dedicated to Unitrends was as follows:

Legacy solutions like the products offered by Unitrends stop short when it comes to offering full disaster recovery capabilities. Unitrends offers backup but leaves the important task of testing for recoverability up to you–consuming valuable time. With Veeam’s SureBackup® and SureReplica technologies, you can automatically test and verify every protected VM for recoverability.  [Veeam]

What’s absolutely amazing about this assertion is how blatantly dishonest it is.  Not just misleading.  Not just distorted.  But just flat out untrue.

Veeam offers instant recovery for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.  On top of that capability, Veeam provides recovery assurance (again, what it calls verified protection.)

As noted in Unitrends and Veeam: Continuity and Availability, Unitrends offers VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V instant recovery.  But we don’t stop there.  We also offer physical and virtual Windows server and client instant recovery to VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V via our Unitrends Bridge capability to an external VMware or Hyper-V host.  We do that by creating a replica and keeping that replica updated continuously during our backup and replication processes.  We also offer Windows instant recovery directly on our Recovery-Series physical appliances.

So what do we do in our recovery assurance?  We automate application-level recovery testing as often as every 15 minutes within a custom sandbox so that you have 100% confidence about recovery.  It does not test just a single virtual machine or a server, and not just a set of virtual machines or servers, but all of the applications – including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle, and many, many other applications as well. This includes critical applications that are heterogeneous. For example, it is pretty common to have a physical SQL Server database as the back end for a number of virtualized applications. You can’t truly prove recovery will work if your database is not part of the recovery testing.

You need to ask your continuity and backup vendor some tough questions when it comes to recovery assurance.  Here are just a few.

Do you want recovery assurance for physical or virtual Windows servers and clients?  Unitrends offers this; Veeam doesn’t.

Do you want recovery assurance not only on your software but in your vendor’s cloud?  Unitrends offers this in Unitrends Cloud; Veeam doesn’t have a Veeam Cloud.

Do you find it valuable to see what your actual recovery times and recovery points are?  We have a simple report showing not just the RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) and RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) – but also the RPAs (Recovery Point Actuals) and RTAs (Recovery Time Actuals.)  Veeam doesn’t.

When testing recovery, do you need to test your applications at a deep level and see exact details of those tests to be confident?  We have simple options to test applications, databases, websites, and run custom scripts with a simple audit report.  Veeam doesn’t; Veeam needs scripts to test applications and does not give you a test audit report for confidence.

It’s one thing to twist the truth; it’s another thing to break it.  Veeam’s comments concerning recovery assurance (again, what it calls verified protection) are simply dishonest.  Unitrends has a fundamentally superior recovery assurance offering – not just versus Veeam but versus the rest of the industry as well.  And in 2016 you’ll see us not only keep our lead, but accelerate – we think recovery assurance is incredibly important and are working to delight our customers with this technology in the future.

Do you have any perspectives on recovery assurance?  As always, we’d love to hear from you.

Guide

• 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