This week Vizioncore released the first major update for its backup/recovery product vRanger Pro since the 4.0 version made available in July 2009.
With this release, still part of the Data Protection Platform effort, Vizioncore is clearly going after PHD Virtual, as two key new features are part of competing products or have been announced to be part of them.
Specifically, we are talking about the support for vSphere vStorage APIs and the Change Block Tracking (CBT) technology, that provides the list of blocks that have changed inside virtual disks, avoiding to rescan the VMDK file and thus reducing the time to complete the incremental and differential backup.
PHD Virtual introduced this support in Backup for VMware ESX (formerly esXpress) 4.0.
The other one is the Object Level Restore, that allows vRanger Pro 4.5 DPP to recover single emails, folders or other objects from a Microsoft Exchange Server backup.
Vizioncore is leveraging Recovery Manager for Exchange (RME), developed and sold by its parent company Quest to achieve the task.
Veeam announced upcoming application-level restore two months ago as part of Backup & Replication 5.0, expected in Q3 2010. The difference is that Veeam promised to extend this technology besides Exchange, supporting also Microsoft Active Directory and SQL Server.
The new version of vRanger has additional, very interesting features:
- Active Block Mapping (ABM)
A patent-pending technology which eliminates deleted blocks from the read blocks from the VMDK, improving performance of all type of backups (including the full ones) and reducing the backup image size. - Support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS)
- Support for custom backup groups
- Support for encrypted repositories (with AES-256)
- Support for VMware thin disks provisioning (thin disks are preserved during restore)
