Symantec admits all its VMware backup customers are in danger

Modern Architecture Wins Every Time: Veeam Customers Unaffected

Last week Symantec published a blog post scaring all VMware customers about backups on vSphere 5.1. In this post they made insinuations that backup vendors claiming support for vSphere 5.1 were misleading their customers and putting them into unsafe recoverability conditions. While we’d like to think that Symantec did this as a service to their customers, we believe this is just another example of a Symantec trying to use scare tactics against their biggest competitor, Veeam. We believe this creative FUD was created just to explain why Symantec still does not support the latest vSphere release – unlike Veeam which does support it.

Symantec went on a campaign to scare people from using Veeam and more importantly to scare them from upgrading to vSphere 5.1. Here’s a Tweet sent out from the official Backup Exec account using the #Recoverynightmare tag:

 

This is a very bold, public claim since VMware itself states in the KB that the issue is intermittent. Symantec even used this language in their original blog post that has since been updated. Here's a screen shot of the original that is quoted below.

“During our testing with the VMware vStorage 5.1 API Symantec discovered issues* that introduce data recovery risks“

“During these weeks of close examination VMware also confirmed that any 3rd party vendor depending on the current API cannot perform consistent backups and cannot ensure a reliable recovery point”

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