PHD Virtual Rollback Recovery at University of South Florida

PHD Virtual Technologies, Inc. announced that Tampa-based University of South Florida (USF) is using its Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA) with its patent-pending Rollback Recovery feature, for VM data protection and DR.

USF found PHD Virtual about a year ago while searching for a new backup solution. The primary requirement was the ability to restore a VM without the hassle of post configuration. USF looked at a variety of backup appliances that would help them achieve that goal, and decided on PHD Virtual Backup for three reasons.

• First, the host-based replication feature provided by the VBA is easy to use and complements the replication USF was already doing with Data Domain. This helped them get the data to a secondary site to ensure DR preparedness.
• Second, since PHD is a virtual backup appliance, it is hardware agnostic which enables great target storage flexibility. Third, PHD puts a supreme focus on recovery and they were impressed with just how fast PHD can recover VMs, files and application objects.
• And lastly, PHD delivers all this functionality at a price an educational institute can afford.

“We run a student information system that is critical to our operations. Supported by Oracle, the patching, updating and installing can get a bit tricky, especially when dealing with middleware,” said Steve Lambropoulos, systems administrator, USF. “Often times there are several different scenarios, or possible outcomes, to evaluate after an update is applied. At this point, we simply take a backup, and then evaluate each one of these scenarios. PHD Virtual’s Rollback Recovery allows us to easily ‘rollback‘ each time without starting over and wasting valuable time and resources. We are able to do this until we’ve identified the optimal scenario.”

“Since Rollback Recovery eliminates the need for a full VM restore process, and allows you to only restore the virtual disk changes over top of the existing VM, it’s the perfect feature for this type of scenario because it’s so fast,” said Joe Noonan, senior product manager, PHD Virtual. “In fact, in production restore situations; it can drastically improve the RTO of full VM recovery, sometimes up to 100 times faster.“