Quoting eChannelLine

A business continuity appliance vendor has come to the rescue for end user customers struggling with backing up files on physical and virtual machines within their IT infrastructure.

StorServer's new plug in and play VMWare's Consolidated Backup (VCB) solution for centralized backups, disaster recovery and archiving is specifically targeted at mid-market customers with a couple of hundred users and perhaps five to ten terabytes of data, stated Laura Buckley, StorServer vice president of product development.

"We support different operating systems, databases and e-mail platforms."

This hardware and software solution in a single server box incorporates VMware Consolidated Backup and in the process simplifies the vendor's complex solution, she continued.

"The consolidated backup product from VMware is somewhat complex and difficult for customers to understand how to deploy."

The backup and restoration of a file on a consolidated server environment under a VMware virtualization solution can cause challenges for traditional backup solutions, Buckley.

These include complex scheduling and management, long backup windows and high CPU and network usage.

"If we run multiple concurrent backups, with multiple virtual machines on a single host that can have serious performance impact and resource degradation."

She noted that some companies are forced to shut down the virtual machines before performing backups, which then can only be performed after office hours.

The StorServer VCB Appliance eliminates the need to have individual backup agents on each virtual and/or host machine with the inclusion of a backup scheduling process, stated Buckley.

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, the StorServer spokesperson added. When the backup is complete the schedule dismounts and releases the snapshot of the virtual machine.

Backup has been "a difficult issue," commented Michael Osterman, a principal at Osterman Research.

"Backup windows are very difficult to manage, because you essentially run out of time for the backup. There are not enough off hours [and] it cannot be completed. You can back it up, but in many cases, you have to shut down servers. It is a thorny issue."

Osterman added that appliances are very useful for the mid-market where companies are big enough to have serious backup problems but lack the IT resources to deploy their own servers and manage them.

Others features in the StorServer VCB includes progressive incremental backups, policy based retention and disk-to-disk backup.

StorServer currently has 288 channel partners and conducts all of its business through the channel, said Buckley.

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