A Network Testing Labs test showed that by choosing the right tool for data backup and recovery, you can save tens of percent of time and significant disk capacity.
What follows is an abridged translation of the original article. You can find the original version here.
Acronis Backup Advanced versus Veeam Availability Suite v8
Acronis Backup Advanced was faster, more reliable, more scalable, easier to use and less expensive than Veeam Availability Suite v8. Importantly, it backs up both virtual and physical environments.
Executive summary
Acronis Backup Advanced:
- backed up and recovered data faster,
- supports physical (non-virtualized) servers and all major hypervisors,
- costs significantly less,
- was easier to use.
Setting up and configuring Acronis Backup Advanced could not have been easier. An important fact is that it uses network resources efficiently when copying (or restoring) files; moreover, it was much easier to use and helped us manage our data better.
When disaster strikes
People are often the cause of data disasters. A catastrophic hardware failure, flood, fire or explosion involving your computers may occur, but it may not. Human error, however, is inevitable sooner or later. Even the fingers of the most experienced user can turn into clumsy paws without warning.
Users often delete data, files and emails without thinking. Sometimes you find that the data that has just disappeared is crucial to your business. Your business comes to a standstill when you least expect it because you are working to recover lost data.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 93% of organizations that suffer a catastrophic data loss cease operations within 5 years. A study by Cummings, Haag and McCubbrey found that 51% of companies that suffered a major loss of computer data went out of business within two years. Of these, 43% never resumed operations.
Fortunately, data backup and recovery products are offered by many vendors; they can protect you against the risk of data loss and business interruption. However, you also need a flexible disaster recovery plan that accounts for all the different data recovery options you may encounter.
The ideal data backup and recovery tool stores current copies of your data in one or more secure repositories. It should be easy to use, able to create useful reports, provide granular recovery of important data, and work with the computing platforms used in your organization. The best data backup and recovery tools do their job quickly, consume few computing resources and are not expensive. They protect both physical and virtual environments, can move data to and from physical and virtual computers, and support all hypervisors in your data centers.
We evaluated two market-leading data backup and recovery products in our network lab in Alabama, USA, to determine which one we could recommend to you. The products tested were Acronis Backup Advanced and Veeam Availability Suite v8.
Our testing showed that Acronis Backup Advanced is significantly better at data protection than Veeam Availability Suite. Importantly, Acronis Backup Advanced supports both physical and virtual computing environments, while Veeam works only with virtual environments. In addition, Veeam supports only two hypervisors, while Acronis works with six.
Acronis Backup Advanced is faster, uses fewer computing resources, is easier to manage and costs less than Veeam Availability Suite. Acronis Backup Advanced therefore won in a head-to-head comparison and received the Network Testing Labs World Class Award as the best backup and recovery product.
Performance
We used four metrics to compare Acronis Backup Advanced and Veeam Availability Suite:
- backup and recovery speed,
- disk space usage during disk-to-disk transfer,
- network utilization,
- RTO/RPO system recovery time.
In the first round of tests, we measured the time required to back up and recover 140 GB of server data for different computers – file servers, email servers, web servers and database servers. The averaged results are shown in Figure 1.
In every test, Acronis Backup Advanced completed backup and recovery operations in significantly less time than Veeam Availability Suite – 23 percent faster for backup and 20 percent faster for recovery. It should be noted that Veeam Availability Suite must operate at the virtual machine level and cannot back up or recover physical computers, which Acronis Backup Advanced can and does do.
Figure 1. Average backup and recovery times of Acronis Backup Advanced and Veeam Availability Suite for 140 GB of data
In the second round of tests, disk-to-disk transfer operations copied data from the primary server to the backup server. Figure 2 graphically shows the average disk space usage for both products. Both Acronis Backup Advanced and Veeam Availability Suite compressed data on the backup server and also used deduplication to reduce disk space consumption. Acronis Backup Advanced required an average of 13 percent less disk space on the backup server for backup operations than Veeam Availability Suite.
Figure 2. Average disk usage of Acronis Backup Advanced and Veeam Availability Suite when backing up 200 GB of data to disk (using compression and deduplication)
The third round of our tests measured the network overhead of both products during disk-to-disk backup and recovery operations between the primary and backup servers. Average results are shown in Figure 3.
Acronis Backup Advanced, with network overhead of only 13 percent, used computing resources more sparingly and efficiently than Veeam Availability Suite on a 1 Gbit/s Ethernet link. By contrast, Veeam Availability Suite's network overhead was 16 percent.
Figure 3. Average network overhead during server-to-server backup and recovery for Acronis Backup Advanced and Veeam Availability Suite (1 Gbit/s link).
To measure the performance of Acronis Backup Advanced and Veeam Availability Suite in terms of Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), we simulated a failure of four Windows Server computers containing a total of 65 GB in a small data center. One of these computers ran SQL Server 2008, another Internet Information Server (IIS), another an OLTP business application, and the last one was a backup server. In our test, both Acronis Backup Advanced and Veeam Availability Suite copied data from the primary servers to backup servers at a remote location. Four computers at the remote location were ready and waiting to begin operation in the event of a disaster. We measured the time in minutes needed to recover the data and resume operations.
It should be noted that due to Veeam Availability Suite, all servers – both at the primary and secondary locations – were virtualized using VMware ESXi. Veeam does not support physical environments. If any of the servers in our disaster recovery scenario had not been virtualized, Veeam Availability Suite would have been useless. It should also be noted that Veeam backup and recovery software cannot recover a VMware environment to a Hyper-V environment (or vice versa) – the primary and secondary data centers must use the same hypervisor. The much more versatile Acronis Universal Restore can recover data to any physical or virtual computer.
Using Acronis Backup Advanced in one test series and Veeam Availability Suite in a second series, an administrator at the remote location recovered the transferred data to the standby secondary servers. The test ended when the administrator recovered all servers and brought the OLTP application back online.
In the Acronis Backup Advanced tests, the administrator needed just under 23 minutes to recover data to the servers and restore the OLTP application. In contrast, Veeam Availability Suite required 27 minutes. These results are illustrated in Figure 4.
Acronis Backup Advanced was the winner in our disaster recovery test.
Figure 4. Average RTO/RPO recovery times for Acronis Backup Advanced and Veeam Availability Suite.
Usability and features
Acronis Backup Advanced works equally well in physical, virtual and hybrid environments. Unfortunately, Veeam Availability Suite operates only in virtual environments. In addition to VMware and Hyper-V products, Acronis Backup Advanced also supports Citrix XenServer, Oracle VM, Linux KVM and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Veeam Availability Suite works only with VMware and Hyper-V products, without interoperability between them. Unfortunately, Veeam has repeatedly added features in the past that initially supported only VMware, with Hyper-V support following several months later.
Veeam Availability Suite uses Microsoft design standards and Microsoft user interface guidelines to display a tree view of backup sets and objects. The Veeam Availability Suite user interface is not as intuitive or as responsive to user actions as that of Acronis Backup Advanced. It should also be noted that to administer Veeam Availability Suite, you must have at least one actively running virtual machine.
The easy-to-use Acronis Backup Advanced user interface offers administrators a clear and uncomplicated selection of tasks (i.e., immediate backup, recovery, creating a backup plan and account management), a list of recent alerts and a list of recent activities.
If you have backups from multiple locations, both products, Acronis Backup Advanced and Veeam Availability Suite, consolidate and centralize backup status information from all locations.
We note that Veeam Availability Suite works only in the virtual world and cannot perform bare-metal recovery (Bare Metal Restore – BMR) operations. In contrast, Acronis Backup Advanced can restore both Windows and Linux computers to their last working state on the same or different hardware. Acronis Backup Advanced can also protect physical servers, virtual servers and workstations (client computers). Veeam Availability Suite works only with (virtual) servers.
How we tested
The test network consisted of six subnet domains interconnected by Gigabit Ethernet using Cisco routers. Our 150 lab clients consisted of computing platforms including Windows 2000/2003/2012 and Windows Vista/7/8, Macintosh 10.x and Red Hat Linux (both server and workstation editions). Our remote testing took place over T3 and OC-9 WAN links.
The relational databases on the network were Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server versions 2008 and 2012. The network also included two web servers (Microsoft IIS and Apache), three email servers (Exchange, Notes and iMail), and several file servers (Windows 2003, Windows 2008 and Windows 2012 servers). Our virtual computing environments consisted of VMware, XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
Our test platform for all server components of the products was a group of four PowerEdge R720 servers with Dual Xeon E5-26xx processors, 384 GB RAM and 32 TB of disk storage, running Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008 Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A second group of four computers simulated our disaster recovery backup location.
Cloud backup and recovery
Veeam currently does not support its cloud editions. It is moving its customers to “Cloud Connect,” where customers can choose one of the following relatively unknown providers: Cirrity, iland Internet Solutions, Newcloud Networks, OffsiteDataSync or Phoenix NAP, or they can use Cloudberry Backup Enterprise for off-site data backup. Existing Veeam cloud edition customers are naturally unhappy about this change.
Acronis maintains a network of SSAE-16-certified data centers through which it offers cloud backup to Acronis Backup Advanced customers. Acronis cloud backup can be used as storage for temporary or permanent backups or as a disaster recovery option.
Cloud support in Acronis Backup Advanced is integrated into the product, so the cloud behaves like any other data source or destination. Therefore, you do not need to perform any additional configuration tasks or use any external tool to access the cloud. With Acronis Backup Advanced, backup to and recovery from the cloud are completely seamless and transparent. With an adequate transfer speed, they can also be fast and have short response times.
Pricing
Acronis licensing is based on physical servers regardless of the number of processor sockets. Unfortunately for Veeam customers, its licensing is socket-based. (A detailed pricing analysis was omitted from the translation due to potential differences between markets.)
Conclusion
Acronis Backup Advanced was the winner in all our tests. It simply offers higher performance, better features and lower costs than Veeam Availability Suite. In addition, it works with both physical and virtual environments.
Figure 5. Final product comparison
About the author
Barry Nance is a network expert, magazine columnist and book author, and application architect. He has more than 29 years of experience with IT technologies, methodologies and products.
Over the past decade working for Network Testing Labs, he has evaluated thousands of hardware and software products for ComputerWorld, BYTE Magazine, Government Computer News, PC Magazine, Network Computing, Network World and many other publications. He has written thousands of magazine articles as well as popular books such as Introduction to Networking (fourth edition), Network Programming in C, and LAN Client/Server Programming.
He also designed a successful e-commerce web application, created database and network performance testing tools, wrote various software utilities for network diagnostics, and developed a range of special-purpose network protocols.
He can be contacted by email at barryn@erols.com
About Network Testing Labs
Network Testing Labs conducts independent technology research and product evaluations. Its network laboratory connects countless types of computers and virtually every kind of networking device in constantly changing connection configurations. Its authors are network experts who can write clearly and simply about complex technologies and products.
Network Testing Labs experts write reviews of hardware and software products, analyses of the latest technology trends, articles on specific features, detailed technical guides, editorials, buying guides and informed technology forecasts. Our experts give presentations on a range of topics at Comdex, PC Expo and other events. In addition, they create widely used network performance testing software, database performance testing software and network diagnostic utilities.
Article author: ZEBR.ai editorial team
