Quest Adds Physical Server Backup and Restore Capabilities

With virtualization now the norm in the data center, a growing number of organizations are augmenting their legacy physical backup tools with modern technologies purpose-built for the virtual environment.

A recent Quest Software, Inc.‘s survey indicates that 86% of organizations use two or more backup products to protect their physical and VMs. The same survey, however, indicated that more than half of organizations would ultimately prefer a single solution. Responding directly to customers’ desire to reduce multi-product complexity while still implementing best-of-breed VMware backup, Quest has enhanced vRanger to deliver complete protection for virtual and physical environments.

Quest Software unveiled vRanger 6.0, the latest version of the company’s virtual data protection solution. Known for delivering backup, replication, and recovery for VMware, it goes a step further by giving customers the ability to backup and restore physical Windows servers, thus delivering single-source protection for both virtual and physical environments.

VMware Ready certified for vSphere 5, vRanger 6.0 delivers OS support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008, and also will support Windows Server 2012 upon its release to market. In addition, vRanger 6.0 provides application consistent snapshot backups for a number of Microsoft applications, including Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Active directory via Microsoft’s VSS.

vRanger 6.0 enables physical server backup by deploying distributed agents that send data from source to repository, thus delivering enhanced scalability by eliminating an extra step and bottlenecks in the backup process.

Leveraging capabilities it has provided for the virtual environment, vRanger 6.0 delivers a features designed to simplify backup and recovery of physical servers as well, including:  

• Online backups that eliminate the impact of the backup window on production applications
• Application-consistent backup copies of transactional servers such as Exchange and SQL Server
• Incremental, and differential backups to reduce the amount of data backed up
• Patented Active Block Mapping technology, which speeds backups and reduces storage space by reading and writing only active blocks of data
• Resource management that enables users to optimize job results by dialing performance up or down in accordance with available resources and bandwidth
• Native cataloging that enables one-click recovery by allowing users to find and recover files with keyword and wild card searches

vRanger 6.0 now also features French and German language support.
 
VM licenses for vRanger 6.0 will be priced at $769 on a per-CPU basis, while physical machine licenses will be priced at just $300 on a per-server basis.

vRanger 6.0 will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.

Attendees of VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, CA could preview the release by visiting Quest booth.

John Maxwell, VP, Product Management, Data Protection, Quest Software, said: "With vRanger 6.0, customers can finally implement best-of-breed protection for their VMware environments without having to sacrifice the convenience and simplicity of a single-source, single-vendor solution. Unlike legacy physical backup solutions, vRanger was architected specifically for the virtual environment, and unlike niche, virtualization-only backup solutions, it now provides the ability to protect the physical machines organizations have yet to virtualize. We believe this functionality fills a major gap in the backup market, and we’re thrilled to deliver the combined virtual and physical protection that our vRanger customers have made clear they wanted."
 
Jason Buffington, senior analyst on Data Protection, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "While vRanger was among the first innovators of virtualization-specific protection, it’s great to see Quest adding physical server protection as well. Customers who wholly embrace virtualization can often face a challenge when their preferred data protection solution is virtualization-only, and are forced to use a second tool to protect their few remaining physical servers. With these new capabilities, vRanger customers will be able to enjoy a single solution for their whole environment. Quest’s new capabilities and future roadmap align well with what ESG is seeing in trends towards unified protection of physical and virtual, among other data protection modernization trends."