Backup and data storage specialist Barracuda announced several enhancements to its Backup product line to enable faster backup and recovery performance, enhance public cloud support and expand storage capacity.
The company now offers Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup for Office 365 improvements, while the expanded Backup Export Tool now supports exporting data to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for long-term retention.
Backup provides the flexibility for users to run image-based backups with instant recovery for virtual servers using LiveBoot as well as Backup Agent for granular file and application recovery. Backup Agent now also includes multi-streaming and complements existing recovery options for physical-to-physical (P2P), physical-to-virtual (P2V) or virtual-to-virtual (V2V) scenarios.
"With IT spend shrinking year over year, many organizations no longer have the luxury of hiring dedicated IT staff for each discipline, such as network, backup, infrastructure and desktop," Rod Mathews, senior vice president and general manager of Barracuda’s data protection business, told eWEEK. "Modern IT professionals are constantly tasked to do more with less, so a complete solution with an intuitive, all-in-one, easy-to-use management console across the entire environment—from email security to network to content security to data protection—is critical."
Customers with a Barracuda Cloud Storage subscription can take advantage of Offsite Vaulting for long-term retention for up to seven years. For organizations requiring longer retention times or support for external storage, the Backup Export Tool was designed to enable customers to export data to external disk or tape in the local environment.
"Data no longer resides in a single place. Data exists on-premises, virtualized [and] in the cloud, and follows users onto planes, trains and cars," Matthews explained. "Without the right solution, backing up and protecting all this data could mean deploying multiple solutions from multiple vendors, further fragmenting data storage and causing restores to be a nightmare. With this in mind, having the ability to manage backups in multiple locations around the world through a single management portal has become crucial to ensure the backup process remains efficient."
As part of this release, Barracuda has reduced pricing and increased storage capacity for certain Backup models—Backup 990 has increased usable storage capacity to 48TB from 36TB.
The upgraded appliance is shipping for all new customers, and eligible existing customers with an Instant Replacement subscription are able to upgrade via hardware refresh.
In addition, a hardware upgrade is included at no additional charge every four years for customers with a continuous Instant Replacement subscription.
"With the maturity of virtualization, large growth in cloud and SaaS hosted applications such as Microsoft Office 365, and yet still a significant presence of physical servers, most organizations will be running hybrid environments for the foreseeable future," Matthews said. "It is important that modern backup solutions can protect physical, virtual, and cloud environments with the flexibility of being deployed in an organization’s preferred form factor as well."
