Quest Software, which is beginning to make its presence felt in the storage backup and disaster recovery service business, announced Oct. 12 at VMworld Europe in Copenhagen, Denmark, that it has released a new version of its vRanger software package for SMBs.
vRanger Standard Edition 5.0 integrates with existing production servers and enterprise applications to provide data protection for any server, whether virtual or physical.
vRanger uses a proprietary code called Active Block Mapping to speed up data collection and recovery by removing inactive blocks and eliminating the need for the software to write to zero blocks, the company said.
Quest also utilizes something it calls Change Block Tracking (CBT) with the block mapping to reduce the size of backup images. This, by its very nature, reduces the amount of data storage, enabling more efficient virtual server backup and recovery.
The combination of these two is similar to the data deduplication features that come with most other enterprise data backup and recovery packages.
Key features of vRanger Standard, according to Quest:
- Backup and restoration of multiple VMs can be done at the same time, with no limitations.
- Offers distributed processing for direct backup, with no impact on host operations; there is no need to send VM data through a single, central server.
- Recovers multiple VMs at the same time, without having to access the recovery wizard for each and every VM.
- Enables view into which VMs have been protected, when and which need protection.
- Configures new backup jobs, which automatically refresh to stay current with new VMs, as they are added in the environment.
- Restores any type of data from a single backup image-including individual files, databases and full guest systems.
Quest’s vRanger Standard is priced at $399 per CPU, a one-time cost.