TrendMicro: Veeam solution scaled well for us
I love attending user conferences. I often meet a supplier's customers and can have a conversation that leads to a greater understanding of the supplier, what the customer was doing, and why that supplier's products were selected. This time I met with William Dalton, Director of Corporate Technology for TrendMicro. Here's what he has to say about Veeam.
Please introduce yourself and your company
TrendMicro is a leader in IT security and offers innovative security solutions that, in the company's words, make the world safe for the exchange of digital information. It has over 25 years of security expertise and is recognized for its success in server security, cloud security, and small business content security.
The company's security products are supported by the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ global threat intelligence. The company has over 1,200 security experts around the world.
I'm William Dalton, Director of Corporate Technology for TrendMicro.
What were you doing that needed this type of technology?
We've been on an internal virtualization journey. At this point, upwards of 80 percent of our servers are running virtualized environments. We had an incumbent solution that was designed to deal with the old way of doing things. We felt that the old solution wasn't best of breed and was based upon older technology.
The incumbent solution had problems because of its impact on system performance. Our need was to be able to scale our server virtualization projects without letting backup impact our server performance. Our plans were to use both scale out and scale up computing architectures in the future. The incumbent solution didn't scale well.
Cost was another important factor. The incumbent solution's licensing model was based upon scale up architectures. This made scale out architectures too expensive.
Complexity was another challenge. The other solution was attempting to be all things to everyone. Which meant that it was based upon a diluted focus and wasn't really best of breed in that area. We wanted a solution that provided a focused solution that was geared towards a virtualized server environment.
What products did you consider before selecting this one?
We looked at seven or eight solutions. ComVault, VMA, and Veeam were the final candidates. We didn't select ComVault because of the cost and the complexity of that solution. VMA was a scripting based open source solution, but it wasn't scalable.
Why did you select this one?
Veeam was selected because our testing showed that it would have no problems scaling. Veeam was using changed block tracking rather than trying to back up everything. This reduced the impact on systems, storage and networking.
When we examined the overhead of running Veeam in our environment, it became clear that it would minimal impact on virtual server performance.
Veeam's solution didn't have a lot of complex layers of functions. Our operations team felt it could be productive in only six weeks. Other solutions appeared to require as much as six months of their planning and training.
The licensing model for Veeam is based upon the number of physical CPU sockets rather than other metrics. This approach allowed us to use higher virtual server density and still have a lower overall licensing cost.
What tangible benefits have you received through the use of this product?
We've been able to protect our servers without compromising performance and keep our costs lower through higher levels of virtualization. We also have been able to collapse our DR solutions into one single solution. We've been able to handle multiple product development iterations while improving quality and reducing time to market.
What advice would you offer others facing similar circumstances?
Anyone that has a server virtualization strategy with a view to going to the cloud should choose a backup solution that is designed for that.