Veeam SureBackup has finally been announced and more detail released.  In my recent pre-release interview with Veeam’s Doug Hazelman we found out that it SureBackup was an actual technology rather than a specific individual product and today’s announcement fills in the gaps.

SureBackup is a collection of new features which will be found in the next release of Veeam Backup & Replication (v5.0).  It should be pointed out that today’s announcement was exactly that, an announcement, with no actual product available to download and use at this point in time.

As the Veeam SureBackup announcement video mentions, SureBackup is a “new concept built on a proven technology” including the following pre-existing Veeam product features:

• Support for Changed Block Tracking & thin-provisioned disks
• FastSCP
• SmartDedupe & Compression

The newest feature to be added to this existing list of features is “Recovery Verification” which will provide the ability to open and start up every VM which has been backed up and then check the integrity of the OS and any applications it may have installed, along with data.  The amazing thing is that it can do this for every VM each time the backup is run!

So no more risk of finding that your backups don’t actually work or are in some way corrupted when you are up against it in a disaster recovery type scenario.

The process is that upon a VM being backed up the compressed VM backup file is then started and the OS booted.  Once up and running the VM, OS and any applications are then verified to be working ok.

The ‘fenced-off environment’ you see mentioned above can be run on existing hardware so this combined with the minimal requirement for extra  storage makes this a pretty lean setup.  With a backup VM running in the ‘fenced off environment’ a very granular level of application data can be recovered, such as individual emails or records from a database.

To me this all sounds too good to be true and I am going to be interested to see how quickly it will perform these VM backup verifications, along with how many it can do concurrently and whether this is just limited by the hardware on which you are running it on.  Veeam give an impressive example of the times we can expect to see:  An MS Exchange server VM with 156GB of storage only takes 2 minutes to verify – wow! Now that I look forward to seeing.

For more information check out Veeam’s SureBackup video below.

For now it’s just a waiting game until this cool new technology is released for trial downloads, there is no ETA as yet though I will let you know if/when I hear anything.