Veeam is (?) only for VMs?
Veeam is (?) only for VMs?
Today, I had a chat with a Veeam customer who was saying how great the product is when it comes to protecting traditional virtual machines, but when it comes to other things — like tape backups or plugins for Oracle applications and the like — it has issues or at least isn’t as solid. His take? “That’s not their core business, so they don’t invest in it.”
Well, that’s not really the case. For example, on the application side, there’s a dedicated team working specifically on that.
Of course, tapes and plugins came later. But in my opinion, it’s the usual story: there are no simple answers to complex problems.
Virtualization has massively simplified server management, and that naturally extends to backup as well.
Applications like SAP, Oracle, etc., are inherently complex. Their protection remains complex too — because that’s just the way it is. A backup solution can’t magically change the fundamental complexity of what it protects.
Same goes for tapes: do you remember other backup software? Were they really any easier than Veeam when it came to managing tapes? I don’t think so!
Our customer is considering alternative solutions that present storage to Veeam as “normal disk” and then offload to tape, abstracting away the tape management.
Sounds great on paper, and I can’t comment on whether they’re easier to use or not. But even if their administration is dead simple, it’s still one more thing to manage. They’re curious to try these solutions, but at the end of the day, tape remains inherently complex because it only allows sequential read/write, not random access.
Anyone who’s been around long enough, like me, remembers how painful it was using Philips audio cassettes as storage back in the Vic-20 or C-64 days. What a revolution floppies were!