Why Veeam is a great solution for Vsphere backups

Backups are always a cause for concern for any Vmware admin, I have spent many hours evaluating various products and here's why Veeam is the best solution for Image based backups.
Everyone is familar with physhical guest based backups where by something like Backup exec it used and file and application level agents are used to leverage Microsoft VSS and perform database maintance plans that will deal with flushing transaction logs ect.
The Business continuty plan provided by a guest based backup will have two main drivers.

• RPO (recovery point objective) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss , this will typically be 24 hours given that most backup windows are nightly
• RTO (recovery time oblective) this will be how long it will take to get the data back to to restored state to this will usually mean catologing tapes, and configuration process for example to disimlar hardware 

This could mean hours, sometimes days of downtime
In my opnion one of the greatest benifits of VSphere is the functionalty based around Buisness Continuity.
VSphere has a new set of Storage APIs and a new feature called CBT ( Changed block tracking) which greatly enhance the speed and fucntialty of backups, in short CBT creates USN's (update sequence numbers) for the VMDK disks that backup applications can hook into a quickly find out which blocks have changed since the last backup.

So why Veeam??

•  Easy to set up and configure with in half an hour
•  Support for CBT
•  The only true support for VSS application consistent backups in Windows 2008
•  The ability to flush Exchange logs via VSS backups
•  Nice enterprise interface via web front-end
•  Great support and ongoing development
•  Replication included as well as backup at great price point for SMB
•  Run-time proprietry VSS agent
•  Great Deduplication and Compression rates

So to summize if you want a super functional VSphere image based backup and replication tool at a great price point choose Veeam.