There's a fun game some of us in twitterland play called "Where in the world is Doug Hazelman" (sung to the tune of Carmen Sandiego of course!). Doug is the world-wide senior director of product strategy for all things Veeam. This week, Doug is at Microsoft TechEd where they are announcing Veeam's Next Big Thing. I'm sure you've already read all the reports that the next big thing for Veeam is the ability to do Hyper-V based backups. Gartner has reports that Hyper-V will have about 20% market share by the end of 2012. I personally don't think that will happen because Hyper-V's focus on cloud computing and strategy hasn't made its way to market and the only way they gain customers is not by innovation, but by price point. Microsoft is continually playing catch up to VMware and that has been proven time and time again. This time, Veeam is now giving Hyper-V a new feature to compete against VMware.
With the release of Veeam for Hyper-V, changed block tracking (CBT) has been implemented into the product. If you're not familiar with CBT in VMware, it's an inherit feature that started in vSphere 4.0 that assigns a unique identifier from point A to point B so that only changed blocks within an OS are backed up by any backup vendor. For instance, you do a virtual machine backup at 11:00pm on Thursday (Point A), and perform the backup again at 11:00pm on Friday (Point B), the points in question are snapshots and the unique identifier is used by the vStorage APIs for Data Protection. The CBT API call can be used by any third party vendor to query the vmkernel to return blocks of data that have been changed on a disk since it's last backup. This information is all held in a "*-ctk.vmdk" file.
Veeam for Hyper-V allows Hyper-V backups to be done using incrementals instead of full backups every night. Don't ask how me how they did it because Gostev can explain it. This is a good move from the Veeam team and shows how their innovation leads the marketplace as the #1 Virtualized Backup Provider. It's only a matter of time before Veeam figures out how to do cross-platform backup to take customer Hyper-V based backups and restore those backups into a VMware Service Provider cloud that will allow a SMB to meet easier SLAs for DR/BC.
