Quest/Vizioncore opens the vRanger Pro 4.0 beta program

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Not happy enough to enter a new market segment with vControl, Vizioncore is very busy developing the next major release of its flagship product: vRanger Pro.

This version four of vRanger Pro is dubbed Data Protection Platform (DPP) and will be released in three phases during 2010 over the next 12 months.
The new features that it will offer include:

  • Direct to target architecture
  • Instant File Level Restore
  • Support for backup and restore to/from SFTP and CIFS repositories
  • Resource Manager to control throughput
  • Support for PowerShell
  • Support for VMware vSphere

The company VP of Support and Product Management, Jason Mattox, writes on the new corporate blog, Vizioncorum, to provide some details about the new Direct to Target architecture:

…you only need to add more storage targets for the more backups you want to do at one time. This type of backup traffic spread across many ESX hosts can send more data than a single storage target can handle. If your storage target can only handle let’s say 20 backups at one time but you want to be able to do 40, you can just configure another storage target in vRanger Pro 4.0 and you would be able to scale horizontally.

Another great benefit of this architecture is the centralized management of your backups over many datacenters. For example, if you have datacenter A and datacenter B each with their own storage you could create backup jobs from a single install of vRanger Pro 4.0 for both datacenters. When you’re creating the backup job you would just pick VMs at datacenter B and your storage target at datacenter B, this will force the backup traffic to stay between the ESX hosts and the storage target at datacenter B.

The current direct to target architecture protocols that will be supported in 4.0 will be CIFS (windows share or Unix emulating window share) and SFTP…

Vizioncore also published three screencasts about the new release: an introduction of the new GUI, a demo on how to setup VMware vCenter and ESX, and one on how to configure the backup jobs.

The beta program is open since a couple of weeks, so you are welcome to enroll it here.