Vizioncore vRanger Pro 4.0 promises faster backups in virtual environments

One of the early promises of server virtualization was that it would make your virtual administrator’s life easier. And for all intents and purposes, it has. However, in other instances, it has introduced more complexity. Let’s take backups, for example. Vizioncore has found that virtual infrastructures are imposing greater demands on backup windows that system administrators are finding difficult to satisfy. Why is that?

As more applications are finding their way into virtualization acceptance, more and more production systems are becoming virtualized. And as more environments are becoming virtualized, organizations are finding that they are managing even more machines than before thanks to a phenomenon commonly called virtual machine sprawl. Administrators are being pressured to back up more machines and to back them up more often. And while the number of things needing to be backed up continues to grow, the time available to perform these backups does not.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Vizioncore’s vOptimizer Pro enables customers to right-size their storage environments in compliance with VMware’s best practices | Vizioncore is continuing to expand their solution set by including other virtualization platforms beyond VMware. ]

Vizioncore is addressing this challenge with the latest update to its flagship product, vRanger Pro 4.0 Data Protection Platform (DPP). According to the company, this latest version of vRanger was redesigned from the ground up to reduce overall backup windows and provide a platform for fast, comprehensive, and scalable backup and recovery. To speed up backup times, vRanger Pro 4.0 DPP can perform incremental and differential backups. Doing so can result in 15 percent faster backups. The new version can also handle white space more efficiently by disregarding zero-size blocks so that the file size is smaller and shrinks the required backup time.

“All of the efforts that we put into vRanger Pro 4.0 DPP are designed to minimize the size of the backup window by using the fewest system resources across the entire infrastructure.  Today this solution combines parallel job execution, in-line dedupe, direct-to-target architecture, advanced compression, and incrementals to offer best in class performance,” said Tyler Jewel, Vizioncore’s vice president of products. “Over the coming year, our focus will be to enable vRanger Pro 4.0 DPP to extend this performance to every aspect of your datacenter by adding support for Hyper-V, enabling disconnected backup job clients, delivering proxy appliances that can reroute and concentrate traffic, and optimizing how application-specific backups occur for Exchange, SQL Server, and AD.”

And in addition to product enhancements, Vizioncore also released a whitepaper to provide proven best practices and tips to help improve backup throughput without having to increase the backup window or exclude virtual machines from the backup plan. In all, the free whitepaper presents six ways to reduce backup window requirements:

• Back up multiple VMs simultaneously: Using a resource manager within the backup solution helps administrators discover all available virtual servers for simultaneous backup, which leads to faster execution and better resource-utilization.
• Allow multiple recoveries from a single backup: A time-efficient approach, administrators can utilize multiple recovery options and back up VMs only once in a way that enables both file-level and image-level recovery while cutting down on processing time, network bandwidth, and storage needs.
• Rely on incremental backups: Incremental backups perform a block-by-block scan, and they only back up files, data, and VM settings that have changed since the last backup, regardless of type, which allows administrators to select the best option to reduce redundancies and cut down on storage needs.
• Go direct to target: By eliminating the step of backing up VMs through a proxy server, direct-to-target solutions reduce backup time and network traffic while providing added flexibility and scalability.
• Reduce backup sizes: Data de-duplication, file compression, and other reduction techniques, such as eliminating white space and deleting data, are good options for reducing the size of backup files.
• Use flexible tools for the job: Using solutions offering a variety of enterprise-grade automation, scheduling, and reporting features with 64-bit processing provides the scalability needed to back up large environments.

Download the whitepaper Six Ways to Reduce Your Overall Backup Window for free. And go to Vizioncore’s Web site to find out more information about vRanger Pro 4.0 Data Protection Platform.