STORServer, manufacturer of the all-in-one suite of Business Continuity Appliances, announced today its new STORServer VCB Appliance, the first backup appliance on the market to protect vulnerable VMware environments. The new appliance is the only total solution on the market, housing all the hardware and software in one box needed for VMware administrators to have completely centralized backup, disaster recovery and archiving capabilities.

Many businesses utilize VMware because it allows them to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical server, providing consolidation and cost saving benefits. However, this consolidation can cause challenges for traditional backup solutions, including complex scheduling and management, long backup windows and high CPU and network usage. Some companies even shut down the virtual machines before doing backups, meaning backups could only be performed after hours.

The STORServer VCB Appliance incorporates VMware Consolidated Backup to solve all of these problems. Consolidated Backup improves manageability of backups and reduces costs, by centralizing the backup of ESX servers on the STORServer, thereby eliminating the need to have individual backup agents on each virtual and/or host machine. Using Consolidated Backup, a backup schedule is created on the STORServer for each virtual machine to be backed up. Each schedule creates a virtual machine snapshot, mounts the snapshot to the STORServer in the SAN and then uses the STORServer backup client to either back up the full virtual machine or to perform file level incremental backups, thus allowing the virtual machine to continue to operate while the backups are taking place. When the backup is complete the schedule dismounts and releases the snapshot of the virtual machine. All of the other great features of STORServer Backup Appliance solutions, including progressive incremental backups, policy based retention, disk to disk backup, and ease of use are included.

Additionally, customers have only STORServer to call for any support question for software or hardware assistance. Never again will administrators have to call multiple vendors trying to figure out who is responsible for a system failure; the appliance approach to backup, archiving and disaster recovery makes it easier for customers to rely on one company for all their storage needs.

“We are thrilled to bring the first product of its kind to market, said Laura Buckley, STORServer vice president of product development. “As a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Program, we have beautifully integrated VMware Consolidated Backup with our backup appliance reducing the time, complexity and cost for our customers to deploy centralized backup management of their virtual server environment.”

For existing customers, STORServer will offer several options and configurations for VMware backups on any of their appliances.

Pricing for the STORServer VCB Appliance will start at $20,000. All STORServer products are distributed solely through a network of authorized resellers nationwide. For more information, or to locate a reseller in your area, visit www.storserver.com.