Barracuda Backup Protect Data With Added Speed and Performance

Barracuda Networks, Inc. announced several enhancements to its Backup product line to enable faster backup and recovery performance, enhance public cloud support, and expand storage capacity for customers – all at competitive price points.

Backup version 6.3 provides customers with improved performance to more efficiently protect their data with a single solution regardless of whether data resides in physical, virtual or Office 365 SaaS environments.

The enhancements, which are available to both physical and virtual Backup appliance customers with active subscriptions, boost initial backup speed and recovery performance, while shortening restore windows to improve RTOs. This is important today where rampant ransomware attacks continue to increase risks of data theft.

In a research survey conducted by Osterman Research, 49.4% of companies surveyed indicated they had been hit with one or more ransomware attacks in the last 12 months.

A complete backup with an effective retention policy enables customers to recover from a ransomware attack without having to pay any ransom to the criminals holding the encryption keys to their important data.

“Barracuda Backup provides us a with secure way to store critical data, and an efficient way to recover it if things don’t go as planned – such as recently when we were hit with a ransomware attack,” said A.J. Murray, manager, IT, Hayward Tyler Group Plc., a company in design, manufacturing and services for fluid-filled electric motors and pumps for high-pressure, high-temperature applications and environments across the global energy sector. “A solid backup plan makes the difference in having to pay a ransom, lose files all together or recover them in a timely fashion. With Barracuda Backup, we were able to quickly restore our stolen data, allowing us to address this attack with minimal business impact.“

Fast and efficient data restores enhance DR
Backup version 6.3 offers customers a quick and efficient way to restore data. The enhancements boost initial backup speed and recovery performance – by up to 1.5-2x on large files and up to 3x for file server backups with millions of small files with the Backup Agent. Backup provides the flexibility for users to run image-based backups with instant recovery for virtual servers using LiveBoot, as well as the Backup Agent for granular file and application recovery, which introduces multi-streaming in this new version and complements existing recovery options for physical-to-physical, physical-to-virtual or virtual-to-virtual scenarios. Customers also benefit from Backup’s queuing system, which increases replication performance for highly transactional environments with large amounts of replicated change data.

Expanded cloud support – Office 365 and Amazon Web Services
For organizations that have made the switch to Microsoft Office 365 or plan to in the future, the firm updated its firm’s Cloud-to-Cloud Backup for Office 365 to reduce incremental backup windows for all customers. Additionally, Backup gives customers flexibility to support their long-term data retention needs; introducing public cloud integration.

Customers with a firm’s 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. Backup administrators now have the option to export data to virtual tapes stored in AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) or Glacier for archiving using the AWS Storage Gateway VTL.

Backup pricing and capacity update
As part of this release, the company has reduced pricing while increasing storage capacity for certain Backup models. Backup 990 has increased usable storage capacity by 33%, from 36 to 48TB. 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. A hardware upgrade is included at no additional charge every four years for customers with a continuous Instant Replacement subscription. In addition, Backup 995 and 1090 appliance and subscription list prices have been reduced.

“Barracuda Backup provides customers with an easy way to protect their data in a single solution, while our Energize Updates and Instant Replacement subscriptions ensure customers continue to see ongoing value as technology evolves,” said Rod Mathews, SVP and GM, data protection, Barracuda. “We’ve made a number of enhancements with this software release to improve the performance and functionality of existing systems deployed by our customers. Whether customers are looking to improve their DR plans, speed up their backups or expand on public cloud initiatives – Barracuda Backup simplifies that process with innovative technology that is secure, easy to use and affordable, regardless of deployment choice.“

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Pricing and availability:

• Backup version 6.3 is in early availability (EA), and will be available to customers with active subscriptions in the Fall.

• The updated US list pricing for Backup 995 and 1090 is as follows: Backup 995 appliance with 72TB of usable storage capacity starts at the list price of $66,999 for the appliance, and $12,049 for a one-year energize updates subscription. US list pricing for Backup 1090 appliance with 112TB of usable storage capacity starts at $104,999 for the appliance and $18,899 for a one-year energize updates subscription. Replication to the firm’s Cloud for Barracuda Backup physical appliance customers can be purchased in 200GB increments or unmetered with an Unlimited Cloud Storage subscription.

• Backup Vx virtual appliance subscriptions start at a US list price of $599 per-socket or per-server per year. Replication to the Cloud for Backup Vx starts at a US list price of $799 per terabyte per year and includes inline source and target-based global deduplication and compression, as well as data redundancy between or within company’s geographically-dispersed enterprise-grade data centers.

Backup version 6.3 blog post