Veeam VMware Backup Increases by 98% at The Pensions Trust

Veeam Backup & Replication, a backup solution for VMware environments, has increased backup speed of virtual servers by 98 percent at The Pensions Trust, an UK’s multi-employer occupational pension funds for the charitable, social, educational, voluntary and not-for-profit sectors.

Veeam Software, innovative provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, has released new versions of the software twice each year since it debuted in February 2008 and introduced a number of innovations for data protection in virtualized environments. These includes ‘2-in-1’ as backup and replication (near CDP) are combined in one product; instant file-level recovery for Windows and Linux from an image-level backup; and the first to fully support VMware vSphere and vStorage.

"Veeam Backup & Replication is totally brilliant," explained Darren Bull, business support manager for The Pensions Trust. "It’s much faster than the first-generation backup and recovery tool we previously used for virtual servers. I can back up the 800 gigabyte main file server in 10 minutes; the other backup system took eight to nine hours to do the same job, if it worked at all."

Ensuring consistent, reliable backups of the virtual environment was a necessity at The Pensions Trust. Bull said each revision of the previous product deteriorated, which meant he and his team were constantly monitoring backups because they failed continually. "I used to spend countless hours monitoring and manually troubleshooting the old system, which included nights and weekends," he said. "Now that we use Veeam Backup & Replication, a huge weight has been lifted."

Veeam Backup & Replication uses less backup storage space than the previous product too. "There was no self-cleaning with the other product, which meant we had to clean down the file system each week’a process that could take seven to eight hours’and we could only do this on a Sunday when no backups ran. Not only was this a laborious process, but it hardly freed up any space. Veeam uses almost half the space (55 percent compared to 98 percent with the other product), and no manual intervention is required. That is a massive difference," he added.

Bull said another major difference between Veeam Backup & Replication and the previous product is customer support. "I find Veeam support to be very helpful because people actually answer my questions and don’t tell me to wait for the next version. I also like the Veeam forums, which include many contented customers because they did exactly what we did: they made the switch to Veeam Backup & Replication."