STORServer, manufacturer of the all-in-one suite of Business Continuity Appliances, announced at Storage Networking World the company's new STORServer VCB Appliance. The backup appliance is designed specifically to protect vulnerable VMware environments and improve manageability by eliminating the need to have backup agents on each virtual and/or host machine. According to the company, virtualization is on the r STORServer, manufacturer of the all-in-one suite of Business Continuity Appliances, announced at Storage Networking World the company’s new STORServer VCB Appliance. The backup appliance is designed specifically to protect vulnerable VMware environments and improve manageability by eliminating the need to have backup agents on each virtual and/or host machine. According to the company, virtualization is on the rise and to address that growing demand the company’s appliance comes preconfigured to incorporate both the hardware and software needed to provide centralized backup, disaster recovery and archiving capabilities all in one box. Many businesses utilize VMware because it allows them to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical server, providing consolidation and cost saving benefits. However, this consolidation can cause challenges for traditional backup solutions, including complex scheduling and management, long backup windows and high CPU and network usage. Some companies even shut down the virtual machines before doing backups, meaning backups could only be performed after hours. To address these type of issues, the STORServer VCB Appliance incorporates VMware Consolidated Backup on its appliance. Consolidated Backup is designed to improve manageability of backups and reduces costs, by centralizing the backup of ESX servers on the STORServer. They describe the workflow like so: Using Consolidated Backup, a backup schedule is created on the STORServer for each virtual machine to be backed up. Each schedule creates a virtual machine snapshot, mounts the snapshot to the STORServer in the SAN and then uses the STORServer backup client to either back up the full virtual machine or to perform file level incremental backups, thus allowing the virtual machine to continue to operate while the backups are taking place. When the backup is complete the schedule dismounts and releases the snapshot of the virtual machine. According to the company, the appliance also includes important features such as progressive incremental backups, policy based retention, disk-to-disk backup and ease of use. They also said that customers have only one vendor to call for support – STORServer. The appliance approach makes it easier for customers to rely on one company for all their storage needs. Pricing for the STORServer VCB Appliance starts at $20,000. And for existing customers, the company will offer several options and configurations for VMware backups on any of their appliances. Software Development