Unitrends and Veeam: Physical Protection

How can the subject of Unitrends and Veeam physical protection be interesting?  Unitrends protects over 200 versions of servers, storage, operating systems, and applications.  Veeam has recently brought out some stand-alone tools for Windows and Linux protection.  Unitrends is dedicated to the premise that a unified architecture encompassing virtual, physical, and cloud is the best way to create the most value for IT professionals.  Veeam states that our belief in unified architectures means that we are a “legacy” data protection vendor that isn’t “modern” and should be immediately dismissed.  In addition, Veeam doesn’t offer either its own Veeam Cloud nor does it offer support for hyper-scale clouds such as Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Storage platform.  It doesn’t feel like a fair comparison, does it?

From the standpoint of integration, simplicity, ease of use, elegance, and functionality, it’s not a fair comparison.  Unitrends wins, hands down.  Physical protection can’t be viewed as an antiquated notion not worthy of modern IT professionals.  And even if physical protection were to drop to zero overnight – everything was virtualized – the needs for deep virtualization which is based on the notions of native-entity backup would only increase.

Much like Veeam’s approach to deduplication, the segregated Windows and Linux physical protection software Veeam has produced seems designed to minimally meet a checklist item rather than being a serious attempt at solving the core data protection issues of modern IT professionals.  As we begin seeing advances in forms of virtualization – from VMware Photon to “lxc” Linux containers to Windows docker support – you can’t help but wonder what happens to architectures built upon VMware vSphere protection and extended to Microsoft Hyper-V without any foresight concerning a more heterogeneous and agile world.

So how can the subject of Unitrends and Veeam physical protection be interesting?  It’s interesting in terms of understanding the culture of the two companies and their attitude toward the buyers and users of their product.  Veeam has a data protection offering to protect VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V – and a separate offering to protect Windows – and a separate offering to protect Linux.  Unitrends has a unified offering to protect virtual and physical and cloud.  Unitrends offers physical-to-virtual, instant recovery, recovery assurance, and other functionality; physical environments aren’t relegated to the status of scrubs sitting on the bench at an athletic event.

In short, it’s a story of one data protection vendor that believes in small umbrellas protecting each segregated type of IT environment and another continuity and backup vendor that believes in a single big umbrella protecting the whole of that IT environment in a unified fashion.

So what do you believe – in segregated or unified data protection?  Lots of small umbrellas or a single large one?  We’d love to hear from you.

 

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