After a short public beta program, Vizioncore released the fourth major release of its vRanger Pro.
As detailed in the previous post, the product is evolving into something articulated, a Data Protection Platform (DPP) as Vizioncore calls it, that will be released in three phases.
During this first phase the company delivers the new pluggable architecture called Direct-To-Target.
Direct-To-Target allows to extend the product with additional components that provide support for multiple protocols and storage targets.
It’s likely that the company will release these components in the second or third phase, and that will offer them as a-la-carte options. For now vRanger Pro 4.0 supports SFTP and CIFS repositories.
The virtual machines backup and restore now happens without the need to plug into VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), going straight from the virtualization host to the backup repository and vice versa.
vRanger is also able to perform multiple ESX backups in parallel.
On the restore front, vRanger Pro 4.0 supports disk-level and file-level restores but in future the product will also offer object-level restores: when the backup involves, for instance, a database or a directory services server, vRanger will be able to restore a deleted table or a deleted user.
To do so Vizioncore will probably leverage the technology that its parent company Quest is already offering through dedicated products like LiteSpeed for SQL Server or Recover Manager for Active Directory.
Easy to guess, vRanger Pro 4.0 supports VMware vSphere 4.0. The product also offers scripting capabilities through Microsoft PowerShell support, a language that became critical in the Vizioncore strategy in the last few months.