I think most would say Veeam is kinda the gold standard at this point. It has a long history of being fast, stable, and simple. Obviously it will come down to requirements, and backups are f-ing important, so you need to make sure you document your requirements and do a lot of use-case studies and tests. But overall Veeam can do just about everything these days. 4TB+ high transaction would be a good use case to test. Can you make a replica in a test environment and run some transaction scripts? Usually that's not too terribly difficult to test/replicate...

I highly recommend Veeam for Enterprise. I've had to do full restores of VMs containing databases with transaction logs. Depending on your infrastructure I restored around a 4 TB database in less than 5 minutes, but that was on 40 Gbps fibre channel.

Yea veeam is a great product for local backups and can replicate backups to a cloud repository very easily.

Been about a year since I've used it, but it was a great product when I did. Support got kinda shitty, but the product itself was fantastic.

Seems like VEEAM is the gold standard backup product around these parts.

r/Veeam might be helpful.

I do like Veeam personally. That said, I highly encourage you to review their documentation about SOBR repositories. I feel like our VAR wanted to sell a big fancy storage box, and in reality we'd have been better off with several smaller boxes. The key point being scaling out instead of scaling up. If you put all of your backups in one big ReFS repo, you have one point of ingest and offload for any scaling out (S3/etc). In our case, we have 220TB in one large server via two RAID60 arrays. RAID60 is not great for write speed. IN addition, we have 2 big failure pools, instead of 6 smaller ones. With SOBR, you can have 6x40TB backup file servers where Veeam can send data in and out of. That's 6 sets of 10Gbps links, 6 different RAID arrays with separate IO characteristics, and 6 overall solid streams for backup. It basically balances things as you send in data, and in doing so gives you a good **s**caled **o**ut **b**ackup **r**epository (SOBR). ReFS or eXFS (I think) can do some pretty good thinks as far as Dedup/Compression goes, as well as speed with synthetic full backups. I'd recommend the Linux hardened repositories with immutability at this point though. All in all, Veeam will tell you they are a software solution. They are not 'cheap' as one poster put it. Their entire focus is the software, and they do not get too far into the weeds on hardware platforms. If you're a Dell/Cisco/HP/etc shop, you do you. They'll simply tell you what OS you need to run, which is either the latest versions of Windows or some form of Linux, with multiple options to suit your needs.

Avoid netbackup. Veeam is good for enterprise Commvault is good for mega mega Corps

Veeam, Rubrik, Cohesity. Get cost workups for all 3. Pit them against each other to drive the price down. I wouldn't consider Commvault, netbackup. We've had veeam for several years and it works well, but support has been pretty terrible. Opened a severity 2 ticket the other day, got the initial acknowledgement email, now 6 days later, no response. If you want data immunizability/ransomware protection on-prem, a linux repository is your only option.

We also use Veeam a lot, next to that have experience with Backup Exec, Azure DPM and Altaro but are in the process of moving those clients to Veeam. Almost all of us (40+ engineers) like Veeam the most of the used backup products.

We've used Veeam, Veeam One & Veeam for O365 backups and it's fantastic. We have an Azure/On perm, 9 physical site setup, where restoring from backup(s) is seamless. The good thing about version 11, is that it has some native immutability for Ransomware/backup prevention. Cool stuff.

I've used all of those in the past - regretfully - and come to accept Veeam as the best universal solution. I think the other are cheaper, but Veeam is more comprehensive, friendly and forward-looking last I saw if you end up having more cloud presence. Rubrik is cool also, but I don't have much experience with it.

Small business with handful of servers with esxi, veeam is amazing, tried loads of backup solutions before settling with veeam, its so much better, reliable and easy to use, love it. Only downside is it requires a windows server to run it, no Linux option for the controller. And when we had a total disk failure in one of our servers, the hourly backups restored perfectly and saved our bacon. Couldn't recommend it enough, many others say it does scale well to larger enterprises and I can see why, interface is really usable too

I really like veritas backup exec for these types of workloads... HAHAHAHA just kidding.

We dumped Veeam for Unitrends. We just liked the way it worked.. Not an endorsement- it's just best for our shop.

Veeam is one of the best in the field and only their support manages to top that already good public image they hold. Fast, responsive, helpful and always polite.

As someone who's recently converted from many years of Legato/EMC/Dell Networker I find Veeam to be incredibly easy to use. Their support isn't great, pretty slow to respond to lower-priority jobs, have no experience with high priority jobs though as haven't needed it. Veeam will perform as well as your underlying storage/network/compute. Using virtual proxies for virtual appliance hot-add transport mode with backup encryption enabled we see backup throughput of up to 800MB/s which is about as fast as the target spinning-disk SAN storage will go. Haven't had any issues backing up highly transactional MSSQL and Oracle DB's, we're using periodic transaction log processing with the VM backups. CDP doesn't really feel ready for production, it works but some things like alerting in Veeam One still have a few issues. For example when a CDP session starts Veeam One will send you a SLA compliance alert then a subsequent resolved alert a few seconds later, this is just an annoyance but when you get false alerts staff tend to just ignore them and miss the real alerts. Also the protected VM's reporting doesn't show VM's as being protected by replication even if they're being protected by a CDP replication policy. Another caveat is their NAS backups are incredibly limited. Despite NAS capacity being a very expensive license you still can't copy NAS backups to cloud (not even using a SOBR) or even copy the backups to tape, they can only exist on disk. Apparently this is coming but their sales people don't tell you this stuff up front and it's not entirely obvious on their website which is frustrating. If you're just looking to back up a VMware environment then I'd recommend Veeam. If you're looking for a full data protection suite I don't think Veeam is quite ready yet.

Short Answer: Its good Long Answer: Really depends on your needs - deduplication, compression and how long you can afford to wait till your data is restored in case of the doomsday. If you are a small organization, and you can afford to wait a few hours to restore to normalcy, the veeam is the cheap and best option. If you are in the US, warning you VARs will try to sell you garbage like Unitrends, Carbonite and stuff - stay away from them. Commvault, Dell DP and some of IBM's solutions are not comparable to veeam, they are expensive and meant for large enterprise space where even a 15 minute outage cab cause mayhem. Also, Veeam works with almost any storage provider

If you can afford a Cadillac go with Rubrik. If you need the best cheapest option go with Veeam.

We use NetBackup and it just always seems a pain to me (I haven't actually had anything to do with backup admin for several years though). It's \*always\* the constraint when we're looking to move quickly to new hypervisor or guest OS versions - Veeam seem to get ahead of the game and release an update for compatibility shortly after the OS vendor release. One thing I think that's in NetBackup's favour is the hardware appliance option (which we use extensively), having a one-vendor solution for something that throws up as many issues as backups do is surely a plus point. Then again if other products don't produce as many issues maybe that's not such a big deal.

Thats what we use. FYI they have a free version that does like 10 machines you can play with it.

We use Veeam as well, and its been great, haven't had to contact support yet. so i cannot comment on that.

We use Veeam and have done so for the past 6-7 years. We have not had a failed restore yet. We do manual restore twice per year of all backups (100+ VMs). Surebackup is great for automatic testing of backups. I honestly don't have something to compare with so I can't say if it's worse or better compared to something else. I am very happy with how it works and how simple it is. Their support have been very quick at helping with problems. The only downside it requires windows.

Veeam support is top notch. Have never had an issue with support and always get my questions answered.

Absolutely! You can even back up cloud data or servers. Easy to learn, has great support. We use Veeam on Enterprise level for servers, VMs, datacenter.

Using it right now. Good stuff.

We use them. We love the option to spin up servers using the backups in case a production server goes down. Has saved us a couple time.

Another vote for Veeam here, been using it for the past 9 years, and it is rock solid. The new features added to v11 are awesome (immutable hardened Linux repos, for a start). Well worth the money.

IMO the answer is complicated. Veeam is a software product and at scale can get cumbersome to manage. It’s very important to understand the Veeam infrastructure you deploy. I recommend looking at Veeam and flashblade or flasharray//C architecture. Depending if you want to continue with on-host proxies or off-host proxies to minimize impact will vastly impact your infrastructure design. In the Enterprise they run into very stiff competition with CommVault HyperScale architecture, Rubrik, and Cohesity. Each of them offering unique value propositions in today’s Enterprise environments.

It's a good product but I find it lacking a bit on the security side. It's pretty much need local admin right on every system you backup and if your on Hyper-V you can't disable NTLM since he need it to communicate with the host... They should be fixing the second one someday, but it's been a while since they said it.

as a DBA I've used Netbackup and CV. Not too many complaints for either one. I looked at Veeam years ago because they had a good VM replication product but never used it. ​ I don't know about Veeam, but CV has some insane compression ratios for their SQL backups. Netbackup I used with tape

Veeam is absolutely wonderful. I have used it in my last 3 jobs. Now with the newer SOBR functionality and immutable backups on prem and in the cloud its great.

Veeam i so miss it, had it for 10yrs. Current employer is a commvault shop and feels so dated

Yes a hundred times over. It’s quick and easy to use and saved the bacon many times in the 10 years I have been using it.

We moved from netbackup to veeam which was amazing in terms of speed and dedup to ease of restore

I absolutely love Veeam. Maybe it's that we switched from Symantec Backup Exec though. Anything would have been a huge step forward.

Only one I would trust

We looked at Veeam but ultimately we determined that Unitrends backup did everything we needed Veeam to do while being significantly cheaper.

For years I had nothing bad to report on Veeam, but in the past months I stumbled over more and more things, that made me think there must be something better. - Configuring GFS backups seems a little bit too complicated. - I want to place backup chains older then the currently active on cold storage is a nightmare and requires you to literally do complex mathematical calculcations. - The Veeam PowerShell API is fucking terrible! One example: Many, many properties have a different displayname than their name. Example: Get-Acl prints a table. The table headers are the exact names of the properties you can query. Doing a similar thing with a Veeam-Object displays you a table header "Name", but then printing $object.name returns a property not found error. - Reporting fucking SUCKS. - If your company defines RTOs and RPOs, it's just terrible to translate that to a proper Veeam configuration. Especially if you have backup-copy jobs. I've been looking at the gartner magic quadrant, for other companies close to Veeam, and I had some demo meetings with them and they just nailed it with their ability to define backup cycles with RPO/RTO as well as with the reporting.

I'd normally recommend Veeam, but my experience with their support lately, both in French and English has not been the greatest. Might just be a bad time though, it happens.

TBH, I'm a TSM user. From the features standpoint, I honestly can't see where Veeam gives me better security than on TSM. I've worked with both solutions. Veeam doesn't run on Linux servers. Having been on several ransomware incidents in customers, having the TSM server on Linux protected me. Disk, tape and cloud usage are lower on TSM TSM allows me to create copy pools so I have protection of contents on either media on another one. Veeam can't come close to the logic of version exists / version deleted / retonly / retextra. It allows for a much granular control of Data protection. This is specially helpful in virtual machines if you use TSM for VE. Sometimes VMs can go days without a backup without a backup due to operation errors. TSM will retain that minimum amount of versions of the VM. Veeam will prune them after that amount of days and leave you with no backups of the VM in question. Our Oracle DBAs have always preferred TSM. If you're a Microsoft shop, Veeam talks well to the whole Microsoft ecosystem, but be certain that it is not a solution on par with TSM on so many aspects.

YES. Absolutely.

Veeam works well enough, but if your backups aren't on immutable storage or air-gapped; they can easily be encrypted and rendered useless by ransomware. I've read that some people are using a Linux FS as a repo and rendering it immutable with chattr, though. We had Veeam and got hit with ransomware, and we weren't able to restore from backups as they had gotten encrypted. SAN snapshots are ultimately what saved us. When shopping for a new solution, we needed immutability. Since we're a Dell shop, it was probably going to be EMC Data Domain appliances locally and at DR, but we opted for Cohesity instead. It had a better price point and now it has CDP support for a Zerto-like functionality. I hear Rubrik and Commvault aren't bad ideas either.

Not what you are looking for, but I wanted to leave my opinion. Having used both Veeam and Commvault, Commvault is far more reliable. When using Veeam I am constantly troubleshooting backup issues. Commvault just works. Your mileage may vary.

lol

The product is generally excellent. The support experience has been dreadful

Former TSM admin here, I'm sorry lol. Yes VEEAM is much better. However, there's some limitations with backing up AIX and Oracle. DM me if you've got questions.

Theeir sales team has been super pushy with us. So bad they are the only vendor I have on my "I wouldn't buy from you if you were the last solution on Earth."

I did not like it personally. The tech support was okay I guess but the software is just kinda shit.

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I personally found it to be a pain in the ass to configure and navigate.

I use VEEAM and would recommend it.

Veeam = GOAT. Seriously. Everything else can eff right on off.

you guys are missing out on Windows Backup, this is clearly the gold standard product....

Watch out on your renewals with Veeam...

Depends on what the "to the cloud roadmap" looks like for your company. Cloud compatibility should also play a role in pretty much any new technology solution.

Only drawback to Veeam is their new license model. In many ways I much preferred the per core licensing

Haven't run Veeam on such databases so cannot really tell on this exact case. However, I believe it will depend on the hardware and network setup you have. Otherwise than that, we have been using Veem B&R for a long time and works really good.

Ive handled enterprise backups since forever. Moving from Commvault, to Backup Exec, and finally then onto Veeam. I was amazed how my daily time spent 'on backups' went from hours to minutes. Its a workhorse.

It must be pretty popular since there’s Windows ransomware at specifically targets it.

Why don't you look at Druva? They offer a SaaS AWS solution for VMs, NAS, DBs, File Servers, etc - software has built-in dedupe and they only charge you for storage used after deduplication. Super easy on bandwidth, especially after the first backup. Forever incremental backup, ingress/egress all included. Their security is insane too.. no backdoor access - ransomware can't traverse your historical snapshots :)

check out rubrik

Sure if you trust germany

Only if you can't afford commvault.

Thanks everyone for reading, these posts have really died down in popularity and interaction, and honestly the community interest keeps me making them, so keep upvoting and commenting and if you see any good posts let me know and I'll include them. Here are some posts not from this subreddit. * /r/networking is encroaching on our jerbs! In this [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/pjwu27/what_ups_brand_do_you_guys_trust/) they discuss which UPS to use. (Vertiv/Lieber, APC, and Eaton are the main recommendations, though I think the best advice is to not trust anything and run multiple, multiple brands or production runs at least if possible). * /r/macsysadmin gives a warning about wiping the new M1 Macs, because you might wipe too much and it's decently easy [to do](https://www.reddit.com/r/macsysadmin/comments/pha6w1/new_m1_macs_driving_me_nuts_after_normal_disk/) * For anyone holding onto the idea that there might be an actual competitor to Microsoft Office [LibreOffice](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/pgshq7/libreoffice_conference_2021_kicks_off_online_on/) is holding their confernce this year in a few days

Not much to add but came to say I really enjoyed this post. ​ Could really do with a way of being notified when it gets posted

Love these round ups, thank you.

I do really love these, I don't always see them but the way you write them is entertaining. Hope you can keep it up!

Please make this regular. I wish I could somehow subscribe to these.

Love these so much. So much get posted and I can't use all my time on reddit, right? xD

Good post, nice summary, appreciated! :-) Don't feel too bad if there aren't many comments, many may just follow links from here and comment on the referenced posts. Yeah, ... comments here likely quite general ... and/or all over the map, given what the posting is.

Thanks everyone for reading, these posts have really died down in popularity and interaction, and honestly the community interest keeps me making them, so keep upvoting and commenting and if you see any good posts let me know and I'll include them. Here are some posts not from this subreddit. * /r/networking is encroaching on our jerbs! In this [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/pjwu27/what_ups_brand_do_you_guys_trust/) they discuss which UPS to use. (Vertiv/Lieber, APC, and Eaton are the main recommendations, though I think the best advice is to not trust anything and run multiple, multiple brands or production runs at least if possible). * /r/macsysadmin gives a warning about wiping the new M1 Macs, because you might wipe too much and it's decently easy [to do](https://www.reddit.com/r/macsysadmin/comments/pha6w1/new_m1_macs_driving_me_nuts_after_normal_disk/) * For anyone holding onto the idea that there might be an actual competitor to Microsoft Office [LibreOffice](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/pgshq7/libreoffice_conference_2021_kicks_off_online_on/) is holding their confernce this year in a few days