PHD Virtual Technologies, a pioneer in virtual machine backup and recovery, and innovator of virtualization monitoring solutions, announced today the introduction of PHD Virtual 6.2 CloudHook, the first and only solution on the market to offer powerful local VM backup capabilities, as well as a seamless link to public or private cloud storage for offsite backups. The latest release of PHD's Virtual Backup and Replication includes a module for virtual backup to the cloud making it easy, seamless and affordable for small to medium-sized businesses to backup and recover data to and from the cloud at the touch of a button.

With PHD CloudHook, customers can avoid buying and managing costly cloud gateway appliances and cumbersome tape or other storage media for offsite backups. The PHD Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA) now gives you an easy-to-configure option in the cloud that removes all of that complexity. The best part is that you can recover just as easily from the cloud as you can from your local backups. Getting set up is quick and easy -- one click in the PHD console backs up data to the customer's choice of popular third party cloud providers, such as Amazon, Google, Rackspace or another private/public cloud provider storage. All provide the flexibility to scale as data storage needs increase.

"Traditional Cloud Recovery can present the challenge of how to move an entire VM back to the local data center when the disaster has passed and normal local operations are set to resume. Large files can be impractical to send over the WAN so shipping a disk may be the only option. But that means downtime while the VM and its data are in transit. Companies like PHD Virtual are addressing this cloud recovery challenge with a unique capability called Rollback Recovery," said George Crump, president and founder, Storage Switzerland, a leading independent analyst firm. "With this capability the restore request identifies which changes have occurred between the requested recovery point and the current copy of data. With this information, only the blocks changed need to be sent across the internet connection, not the entire VM, significantly reducing the amount of data transmitted."

"We needed a virtual backup solution, and also the ability to integrate with Amazon cloud storage," said Peter Canale, IT Director at Ben Tire. "We knew Veeam had a Cloud Edition and PHD Virtual has CloudHook. We went with PHD CloudHook as it was a much more affordable option for us, and much easier to setup and use. Also PHD provides much more robust recovery from the cloud because with Rollback Recovery, you only have to restore the changes over the wire."

PHD customers can use cloud storage as the main backup storage target to avoid managing backup storage completely. They could also implement a hybrid storage model that includes critical VM backups on local storage to meet fast recovery time objectives, as well as backups in the cloud for less critical VMs. Otherwise, they could simply use cloud storage for a basic offsite backup option. The flexibility to leverage the cloud as a legitimate target for backups is there with PHD.

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"We are very proud to offer a no worries, no hassle offsite backup solution for customers that is still priced for affordability and scalability," said Joe Noonan, Senior Product Manger, PHD Virtual Technologies. "With PHD CloudHook, customers retain onsite control and recovery of backups with the added assurance of offsite cloud storage. That's peace of mind for pennies---an unsurpassed value that small businesses have been asking for but unable to get until now."

PHD's CloudHook 6.2 builds on its unique, patented virtual appliance architecture to deliver the most powerful, feature-filled, easy to use backup solution for virtual servers at a fraction of the cost of competitive alternatives. The newly added cloud backup features include:

• Built in Data Reduction: PHD Virtual incorporates change tracking, source-side data deduplication and compression to send as little data as possible to the backup target which becomes a big advantage when dealing with low-bandwidth, high-latency connections over the Internet.
• Assured Security: PHD provides government grade encryption both in transit and at rest on the backup target. As users send important data over the Internet to 3^rd party storage, it is important that the data is secure.
• Local Caching: Transferring data over the Internet has performance limitations. PHD's CloudHook adds the benefit of local caching to significantly boost performance and reliability of the data transfer.
• Flexible Retention: PHD's Virtual Full backup mode offers the most flexible retention available for virtualization backup. Due to the enhancements gained from CloudHook, users can freely leverage Virtual Full backups and the great benefits they provide for flexible long-term retention with high deduplication.
• True Forever Incremental Backups: The first backup to the cloud can be time consuming and resource intensive. Once the first backup is complete, customers do not want to perform periodic full backups, or even synthetic full backups that introduce additional processing and risk of corruption. PHD's Virtual Full mode never requires any periodic or synthetic full backups, ensuring the most efficient Internet data transfer to cloud storage.