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Data protection and backup and disaster recovery specialist Paragon Software announced the release of Protect & Restore 3.5, a backup and disaster recovery solution with centralized IT management for organizations employing diverse platforms and technologies in physical and virtual environments.
The PPR 3.5 release offers security in heterogeneous IT environments consisting of domain and non-domain machines, and is now able to work with complex infrastructures utilizing up to 20,000 objects per organizational unit (OU).
In case of a disaster, PPR enables IT administrators to restore any physical or virtual machine, minimizing the downtime and recovery process.
PPR offers agent-based protection of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010/2013 and its email databases. By operating at the application level through MS VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) application programming interface (API), the administrator does not need to allocate time for backup windows.
The release supports the latest Exchange backup technologies, like incremental imaging, data retention, block-level data deduplication, offers flexible restore of all or specific databases to the original or new location, including restore to RSG (Recovery Storage Group) or Recovery Database with the option to create a dial tone database to let users send or receive emails in the process. PPR also allows non-destructive restore of certain mailboxes.
“SMBs need an affordable and unified data protection solution to safeguard heterogeneous IT environments and to prevent any data loss. A large percentage of small businesses do not have dedicated IT staff due to a limited budget,” Konstantin Komarov, CEO at Paragon Software, told eWEEK. “Paragon Software Group releases a unified tool specifically optimized for diverse heterogeneous SMB infrastructures that could be easily installed and managed by businesses with a limited or no IT staff.”
The platform employs the VMware replication mechanism, strengthened and broadened by Paragon Software’s proprietary data processing techniques that enable it to benefit from recovery timings of VM replication during the restore of physical machines.
Paragon’s deduplication works globally, meaning that all backup data sent to the deduplication server is deduplicated.
The release also offers an intelligent continuous validation technique to guarantee all unique data blocks used by multiple restore points and backup storages are consistent, and an additional level of protection can be achieved by using multiple deduplication servers in a mirrored configuration.
Especially for diverse environments that consist of Windows domain and workgroup machines as well as Linux workgroup machines where the Domain Controller security facilities cannot be employed, PPR includes a special security mode called Native PPR Security, where each connection to the PPR infrastructure uses a special session with a unique ID, as protection against remote connection through any third-party application.
The latest release also introduces a new type of backup destination called the disk pool.
Its main benefit lies in the fact that drives can be removed or added to a pool at any time without having to reconfigure the backup policies that use it, which minimizes the risk of downtime or data loss in cases when the allocated storage has failed or run out of space, and fits with current compliance regulations mandating the use of new backup storage media each day.
In addition, backup validation facilities allow the organizing of field tests for an existing recovery plan by simulating recovery procedures in an isolated network environment.
In case of emergency, the administrator can get a failed virtual machine back on track in seconds by failing over to one of its replicas. All product editions include the management console, the deduplication server, adaptive restore (restore to dissimilar hardware) and a 1-year maintenance, including extended support and upgrade assurance at no extra cost.
“Many small business entrepreneurs are experts in what they do but start a business without any training or experience in IT management and data protection practices,” Komarov said. “As a result of inadequate IT management, small businesses experience data loss and, consequently, fail in the early years as a business. In addition to the limited IT budget, and lack of IT resources, small businesses face a very diverse environment using various platforms. Instead of installing one unified solution, they use multiple tools, therefore, Paragon offers a unified protection tool that works with all systems.”