Veeam boosts backup and recovery toolset

Virtualisation management and data protection vendor Veeam is boosting its backup and recovery tool set with the launch of with Veeam Explorer

Currently in Beta, Explorer promises administrators extra capabilities, including a tool for Microsoft Exchange, which is designed to review and inspect Exchange backups in order to find and retrieve individual Exchange items without the use of software agents. Veeam believes that this will have relevance beyond simple data protection, reaching into markets such as e-discovery.

“Our product is designed to replace expensive legacy tools currently on the market for Microsoft Exchange recovery and e-discovery,” said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam’s CEO.

Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots, developed in partnership with HP, is another addition that allows users to recover virtual machines and their data directly from SAN snapshots taken by HP LeftHand and HP StoreVirtual VSA.

“The aim is to enable short recovery point objectives for the most common recovery scenarios: users deleting data, scripts accidentally corrupting data and system updates gone wrong,” said Timashev. “Our approach is to leverage snapshots as part of a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy.”

The Veeam Explorer features will be included with all of Veeam’s backup products, including a free edition of its main Backup & replication tool that the company released in June.

The company claims that Veeam Explorer can browse Exchange databases directly from a compressed Backup file, having the mailbox database ready to search in less than two minutes.

This will make recovering individual items, archiving mailboxes and even performing information for e-discovery a much faster and simpler process according to Veeam. At the same time the product uses SAN snapshots in their native form, instead of converting them to backups: as a result, again according to Veeam, individual items or entire machines can be recovered in 2 minutes or less.

Other recent innovations to Veeam’s Backup & Recovery product include the ability for a Microsoft Hyper-V machine and a VMware machine to be recovered at the same speed, meaning organisations with multiple hypervisors can backup and restore their environments more consistently.