Vembu is a leading provider of a portfolio of software products and cloud services for small and medium sized businesses, and they've been around for more than a decade. The company has focused their efforts on Backup and Disaster Recovery software, and offering organizations both large and small its flagship solution, BDR Suite.  VMblog recently sat down and spoke with Nagarajan Chandrasekaran, Product Manager at Vembu Technologies, to learn the latest and find out more about their new release, BDR Suite v3.9.0. 

VMblog:  How has the response been to your latest release, the NEW Vembu BDR Suite v3.9.0?

Nagarajan:  The response has been excellent! Our customers are really excited with the way the new functionalities of this release has worked on their data centers and are looking forward to more such features in our next updates.

VMblog:  What critical requirements of the market are you addressing with your backup software and how does it keep in-line with the growing trends in technology?

Nagarajan:  This is the era that is witnessing tremendous growth in the size of data, which eventually leads to the increase in threats to data as well. The rise in malware attacks like ransomware have only proved time and again that data backup has become essential than ever. Vembu, being a crucial player in the market of Backup & Disaster Recovery is making a statement by making data backup available for every business by delivering an enterprise level product at an affordable pricing.

We are closely monitoring the data center trends and are very keen to implement them in our upcoming releases. Moreover, our R&D team is currently working with cloud VM backups, backup from storage snapshots, continuous replication for virtual machines and many more features.

VMblog:  The Vembu BDR Suite does come up with a brand value for its affordable pricing.  How do you see Vembu sticking to it in the long run?

Nagarajan:  It's a known fact that 60-70% of the Small and Mid-sized businesses do not have a proper backup solution currently, although there's a need for a DR plan. While there are many backup vendors that offer expensive solutions, Vembu has become an alternative to them by delivering Backup & Disaster Recovery as a commodity to IT setups that does not even have a backup strategy in place. We sense a huge potential in the market to continue delivering our solution at an affordable pricing and there aren't roadblocks to it and we would not want to deviate from it either.

VMblog:  Most IT admins would want to decrease costs on backup storage hardware.  How can they control costs over storage capacity and backup management with Vembu?

Nagarajan:  VembuHIVE is an in-house file system with inbuilt compression, deduplication and encryption settings that aid efficient storage management.  IT admins can make the most out of this functionality with their external storage appliances as well. Moreover, the retention policy of Vembu eliminates the identical blocks of the backed up data, that decreases the storage capacity to a great extent.

VMblog:  What are the key updates that data centers across the globe should look for from Vembu this year?

Nagarajan:  We at Vembu, are going through a rapid development phase that we are currently working with features for Hyper-V cluster environment, Hyper-V VM replication for high availability, planned failover and look forward to ensuring more enhancements and enhance existing features. We would also try to introduce backup from storage snapshot by the end of this year.

VMblog:  How does Vembu compete with other backup vendors aiming modernized data protection with near zero data loss?

Nagarajan:  We are currently working on providing continuous data protection by minimizing our current  RTO and RPO of less than 15 mins. Data centers are moving towards virtualization and there's a significant momentum that is gaining towards containers as well. Businesses are now moving to the cloud and hybrid data centers. Vembu extends support to on-site, distributed and hybrid environments making sure that it assures minimal or zero downtime. We have understood from our experience that a backup tool isn't meant just for data archival, rather it should address the modern data center requirements towards Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery.

VMblog:  Finally, what do customers have to say about the evolution that Vembu BDR Suite has seen in recent years?

Nagarajan:  Many quick updates and releases with continuous advancements have given us recognition and a good customer base. Our customers are happy with the Vembu BDR Suite, the single tool that extends error free backup and replication on multiple platforms at an affordable pricing. Well, that should explain why there's a significant increase in the customer base every month as well.