For anyone interested in alternatives, but have a low budget here are two great options..
1. Quantum vmPro - this has the same functionality as VDP, if your enviroment protected size is under 1Tb it's free as well. Very easy install as an appliance, low resource usage and seems to be very stable. It's missing dedup, but Quantum also offer a storage appliance called DXi v1000 which dedups data stored on it's NFS and CIFS shares. Again, up to 1Tb of raw storage is completely free. Great dedup rates and some fantastic reporting tools built in.
2. Trilead VMExplorer - our enviroment is larger than 1Tb so we ended up going for this as a VDP replacement, we can't afford Veeam or any of the other large names. Licencing is very fair - £450/$700 for the whole enviroment, 1 year of updates. Only disadvantage is that it doesn't offer dedup, but if you team it up with the free DXi v1000 appliance I mentioned above you can obtain this functionality if your post dedup size is under 1Tb.
If anyone has used the above tools and has any comments I'd be happy to hear them,
