Unitrends launches ‘Veeam killer’ VM Backup Essentials

Unitrends has launched a backup software product that takes specific aim at Veeam customers. Launching VM Backup Essentials (vBE) as a “Veeam killer”, Unitrends said Veeam had abandoned many of its customers to focus on enterprise users and had become “arrogant”.

“Customers were once served very well by Veeam, but it has moved on, including from many of its customers,” said Unitrends CEO Paul Brady. “Veeam has become arrogant, compressing discount rates on that channel.”

VM Backup Essentials is a software product that offers enterprise-scale backup for VMware only, with automated ransomware detection and the ability to use the cloud as a target.

On this latter point, Brady also had a dig at Veeam. “Unitrends can be installed and replicated to cloud. Veeam has left customers to find their own cloud or to go via a managed service provider. We provide all that’s needed,” he said.

VM Backup Essentials will sit alongside Unitrends’s backup appliance hardware products, which range from 2TB to 180TB and include hardware products built with flash drives for enterprise use cases.

Unitrends also sells backup software that can be used with VMware and Hyper-V environments and which can use the Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) clouds as targets. It also offers a disaster recovery product that allows customers to replicate data to AWS S3 or Azure Blob storage as a failover location in the case of unplanned outage.

The company also offers cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft Office 365 applications in its Spanning Backup for Office 365 product. Cloud-to-cloud backup has arisen to provide better protection than that offered by software-as-a-service providers and to meet compliance needs.

VM Backup Essentials is priced at $105 per socket per year. The company plans further releases in the series, including disaster recovery orchestration, copy data management, and analytics that will predict the impact of an outage before it happens.