Feature | Veeam Data Platform Essentials | Other Small Business Backup Solutions | The Veeam Difference |
Recovery | |||
Full machine, disk, and guest OS file restore |
Veeam: Recover an entire machine, individual disks, and guest OS files from a single backup. Others: Almost all vendors can recover an entire machine, disks and guest OS files. |
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Cross-platform Instant Recovery for any workload | No or Partial | Veeam: Having extended Veeam’s patented Instant VM Recovery to other workloads, you can instantly recover any workload – virtual machines, physical servers, workstations, cloud instances – to any platform – vSphere, AWS, Azure, Hyper-V – by running them directly from the backup. Others: Most vendors can instantly recover a VM. Yet, only a few vendors can instantly recover workloads beyond VMware or Hyper-V. Those who do, can typically instantly recover only physical servers (they cannot instantly recover other workloads, such as workstations or cloud instances). |
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Agentless application item recovery | No or Partial |
Veeam: Agentlessly recover individual items from backups of applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, Active Directory, Oracle and more. Others: Half the vendors cannot granularly recover application items. Those who do, typically require agents to recover application items and offer limited recovery options (i.e. only download items to the backup server). |
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Restore to public cloud and object storage | No or Partial |
Veeam: Recover data directly to public clouds such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack. Others: Over half the vendors cannot recover data to public clouds. Those who do, typically take more manual steps than Veeam or support only one cloud platform. |
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Backup | |||
Agentless, application-aware, image-based backups | Partial |
Veeam: Create application-consistent, image-level VM backups with application-aware processing without an agent. Others: Most vendors create application consistent VM backups without agents, but they never support all the applications that Veeam supports. Several vendors require agents for log processing or to achieve application awareness, which is needed to granularly recover application items. |
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Backup copy |
Veeam: Copy existing backup data to another disk system for a secondary backup copy. Send backup data to an off-site location that uses dissimilar hardware. Others: All vendors can copy existing backup data to another repository. |
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Backup and Recovery from Storage Snapshots |
Veeam: Create image-based backups from storage snapshots as often as necessary with minimal impact on production and recover individual VMs, Windows physical servers, guest files, and application items from storage snapshots. Others: Almost no vendor can create a backup from storage snapshots and recover data from storage snapshots, and rare vendors who can recover data from storage snapshots typically support few arrays and offer limited recovery options (i.e. no granular application item recovery). |
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Copy backups to cloud and object storage | Partial or Supported |
Veeam: Immediately duplicate newly-created backups to object storage with policy-based copy management. Others: Most vendors can copy backup to cloud object storage, but they regularly support only a limited set of cloud platforms, lack advanced backup copy settings, or have limited data recovery options from backups stored in the cloud. Over half the vendors cannot recover data to public clouds. Those who do, typically take more manual steps than Veeam or support only one cloud platform. |
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Automated backup testing and recovery verification | No or Partial |
Veeam: Automatically test protected VMs for recoverability by running the VM directly from the backup file or replica in an isolated environment, thanks to Veeam’s patented SureBackup and SureReplica. Veeam also supports built-in scripts for application verification. Others: Half the vendors cannot verify protected VMs for recoverability. The vendors who do, typically offer basic test recovery isolation, do not perform advanced verification tests, or lack automated or flexible verification scheduling. |
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Scalable, storage agnostic NAS backup and recovery | No or Partial |
Veeam: Modernize NAS protection and restore to anywhere with extensive support for SMB, NFS, Microsoft Windows, and Linux file and shares without requiring vendor specific APIs or NDMP. Veeam also includes a native changed file tracking mechanism for improved RPOs. Others: Some vendors cannot protect NAS data. Those who do, typically protect only a few specific types of NAS devices, because they use NDMP or suffer from inefficiencies, as they lack capabilities such as changed block tracking. |
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Immutability for ransomware protection | Some vendors support |
Veeam: Create immutable backup copies by leveraging advanced object storage functionality on Amazon S3 and supported S3-compatible on-premises object storage. Others: Half the vendors can create immutable backup copies. |
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Other features | |||
Advanced monitoring and reporting |
Veeam: Veeam ONE delivers powerful monitoring and analytics for the entire IT environment, with comprehensive dashboards and over a hundred predefined and customizable reports, including Intelligent Diagnostics and Automated Remediation to automatically troubleshoot and resolve issues. Others: Offer only basic monitoring, typically limited to backup and recovery job statistics. |
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Image-based VM replication | Partial |
Veeam: Replicate VMs on-site or off-site for disaster recovery (DR). Seed replica VMs from existing backups. Others: Most vendors integrate VM replication into their core backup product, but they typically have limitations, such as extra costs, support for VMware only, or VM replication from backups only (not from production VM). |
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Native tape support | Partial |
Veeam: Store backups on standalone tapes, tape libraries, and virtual tape libraries. Others: Most vendors can store backups on tape, but they regularly have limitations, such as limited tape management capabilities, limited recovery options from tape, or requiring a separate product. |