FalconStor Software has come up with a new way to protect both physical and virtual machines in VMware environments with the introduction of the Continuous Data Protection (CDP) Virtual Appliance for VMware.

The CDP Virtual Appliance is not an appliance in the traditional sense but, rather, a pre-configured software application packaged with the operating system inside a virtual machine.

According to Diamond Lauffin, technology evangelist at FalconStor, integrating the CDP Virtual Appliance with the VMware ESX server provides users with the ability to eliminate mandatory restores and meet data-protection requirements by providing periodic and any-point-in-time access to prevent disaster-recovery scenarios and deliver business continuity.

Lauffin claims the virtual appliance can be deployed in VMware environments in fewer than 10 minutes. He also says the combination of CDP with VMware virtualization allows organizations to deploy FalconStor's storage services using physical as well as virtual servers, ensuring the continuous availability of databases, messaging data, files, and even entire systems in the event of hardware or software failures or site-level disaster.

"This is true CDP for VMware because the virtual appliance has the ability to snap and protect all or any one virtual or physical server within a VMware environment," says Lauffin.

The CDP Virtual Appliance enables physical-to-virtual (P2V) recovery of a crashed physical server, virtual-to-virtual (V2V) recovery of a crashed guest system, and rapid recovery of a lost file or database, regardless of size.

CDP technology allows users to roll back data to any point in time. CDP is the process whereby data is captured and replicated to a separate storage location to ensure data is always available. In the event of a planned or unplanned outage, CDP minimizes data loss by providing rapid data recovery with minimal downtime.

Features of the virtual appliance include snapshots, mirroring, and journaling for any point-in-time access; agent- and application-aware snapshots for transactional integrity and immediate access with no data loss; a replication option that extends data protection to remote sites; and FalconStor's HyperTrac serverless backup acceleration.

Pricing starts at $7,995 for 2TB of capacity and can scale in increments of 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB.

Read the original article from InfoStor, here.