Backup solutions have always followed a similar principle: First, you copy your computer data. Then, you store it somewhere else. If anything happens, you can always recover your old files to avoid losing valuable information. Back in the day, this process was relatively straightforward; create a repository and determine a rotation scheme. And to make things safer, ensure you always have at least three copies of the data stored in two different media types and keep one offsite (the traditional yet highly effective 3-2-1 rule).
The scenario today is a bit more complex. An increasing number of cybercriminals are targeting businesses trying to steal sensitive information and finding new and surprising ways to do it. But this is not the only issue putting data at risk. Extensive storage facilities are also vulnerable to the effects of climate change as they consume massive amounts of energy to keep running and also need to have uninterrupted power supplies. Downtime, we all know, can result in unhappy customers and a tarnished brand image - no matter your industry. And for some businesses, it can be a compliance catastrophe.
Zerto, Veeam, and Bacula Enterprise are three popular data protection solutions that can help guard your business against natural disasters, accidents and Cyber threats. So, which one is a better choice for your company? In this article, we will make a comparison between the three of them, explain their pros and cons, and review their most significant features.
Zerto is part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Its goal is to simplify the protection and recovery of business information, including on-premise data and cloud applications. This solution is suitable for facilitating (and simplifying) cloud adoption across public, private, and hybrid deployments. Zerto’s replication is near-synchronous and tends to have no impact on production - which is great news for your RPO.
How it Works: Zerto supports workloads from Hyper-V, VMWare, Azure, and AWS. What this means is that you can utilize this solution to do cross-platform replication easily. The feature is also helpful for moving workloads between data centers. Zerto can deliver backup and recovery features for SaaS applications such as Workforce, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace. You can protect from and to clouds of all kinds, too, whether public, private, or cloud-native.
Cross-Platform Replication: Zerto supports workloads from Hyper-V, VMWare, Azure, and AWS. This means that you can use this solution to do cross-platform replication. The feature is also helpful for moving workloads between data centres. Zerto delivers backup and recovery features for SaaS applications such as Workforce, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace. You can protect from and to clouds of all kinds, too, whether public, private, or cloud-native.
Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Zerto CDP is built into the solution, which is why it can deliver some of the best RPOs in the industry; less than ten seconds on average. Zerto has always-on replication, journal-based recovery, and application recovery (unlike Veeam, which we will cover too, it doesn’t use snapshots).
Automated and non-disruptive: You can do DR testing with ready-made compliance automatically and without disrupting production. You can orchestrate failovers and migrate and test your backups without impacting your business. This availability maximization can also help you scale-out architecture more easily.
Zerto Technical Details
Zerto Pros
Zerto Cons
Veeam is a popular data protection services company that has grown consistently since it began its operations in 2006. The platform focuses on virtual machine data and replication and partners with several businesses to provide services to a growing customer base. The main benefits of Veeam are the platform’s reliability and speed. Because the solution has a free plan, more documentation is available to help you deal with your backups.
How it Works: Veeam uses VM snapshot technology to create replicas of virtual machines (they do this by combining the snapshots with Changed Block Tracking, or CBT). When the system creates a snapshot, it also assembles a redo file and fills it with all changes made during the replication. Once it’s finished, it merges the redo file with the snapshot into a live disk file - so the next time you start a replication job, you will only have to copy the latest changes to the replica VR. Because of this technology, however, you should keep in mind that Veeam can cause disruptions to production environments and have RPOs of hours.
Modular and Cloud-Native: Veeam Backup & Replication is purpose-built for Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud (which means you can use AWS KMS, Immutability, and Azure Key Vault, too). Its architecture is API-driven and uses native snapshots and security to recover all workloads from anywhere.
Infrastructure Agnostic: You can choose from over 100 cloud integrations and storage infrastructure to guarantee a good TCO (up to 50% in savings). This means that your data won’t be locked-in in any proprietary hardware, and you will be able to combine any storage into one scalable repository more easily.
Better Data Recovery: Veeam can provide fast recovery and has built-in replication encryption if you want to migrate your data elsewhere (for example, offsite). Because of its 100% software-defined and infrastructure-agnostic capabilities, you can also recover your files and apps across multiple clouds using a portable data format.
Backup Security: Veeam Backup & Replication includes automatic backup scans to keep your data free from malware and end-to-end immutability for all your backup files. There is also an automated verification feature to uncover undetected spyware.
Veeam One: Veeam integrates the Veeam One solution, which can help users counteract common issues found in backup and recovery processes. For instance, you can easily access your storage and usage information and have more visibility and advanced reporting.
Veeam Pros
Veeam Cons
Bacula Enterprise is a modern disaster recovery and backup and restore solution focused on medium and large enterprises. This system is a ´heavy lifter´that can deal with the formidable demands of large data centers and cloud providers. It also spans virtual, physical, cloud, container and edge environments while escaping data volume price traps. Bacula Enterprise is ideal for critical conditions that require minimal downtime and fast recovery.
How it Works: Bacula Enterprise supports a variety of backup features. For instance, it includes snapshots, advanced deduplication, single-file restores, and physical, virtual, container, and hybrid cloud backup and recovery. The solution also has a comprehensive range of interfaces for storing and deduplicating technologies and allows backing up directory servers, NAS/SAN storage, NDMP devices, and Exchange clusters.
State-of-the-Art Security: Bacula Enterprise offers a rather unique set of security features. Many high-profile government and military organizations have chosen this platform because it provides especially high levels of security. The system is FIPS 140-2 compliant, uses several file encryption systems, can detect silent data corruption, and has a Tripwire-like capability.
Granular Disaster Recovery: With Bacula Enterprise, you can restore one or more files interactively (for the current backup or for a previous one) and restore complete systems from scratch. You can also restore relational database catalogues, plugins, and files using stand-alone BLS and bextract tools.
Storage Flexibility: The solution supports backup to the cloud, tape, disk, and robotic media libraries. For cloud-based backup and recovery, Bacula Enterprise natively integrates with AWS S3 (available for Windows, Linux, and other platforms). In addition, Bacula Enterprise supports tape and tape drives to give your stored data more extended periods of validity and portability. And for disk, you can create “volumes” on your storage devices and distribute your Storage Daemons across different data centers to distribute the load of writing the files.
Bacula Enterprise Technical Details
Bacula Enterprise Pros
Bacula Enterprise Cons
The three solutions we have covered are all leaders in disaster recovery and data backup. Each of them, however, has different benefits that can fit your business better depending on your particular needs.
Bacula Enterprise is the best backup solution for scenarios where you need to store large amounts of data and quickly recover it. The platform is robust, reliable and was developed with cost-benefit in mind, and supports many integrations such as visualization tools and databases.