It’s been a while since we’ve talked a bit a bout esXpress‘ features. In this post we’ll be looking at the “Date Smart Dynamic Export”, which allows you to pinpoint the virtual data you want to archive, and combine it with your physical backup data.

Utilizing Patent Pending technology, esXpress’ Date Smart Dynamic Export (an extensive set of pre-defined date categories), provides a seamless path for moving uncompressed, native VMDK and VMX files to tape when combined with traditional solutions such as Symantec Backup Exec, IBM TSM, EMC Legato, or HP Data Protector. Since the esXpress software is not required to run restores, future restoration from tape is fast and easy.

The Optimal Combination for the Future of Data Protection

Today’s system administrator must protect the systems they’re responsible for with the best software available. esXpress in coordination with existing backup solutions, yields a faster data to tape backup, creating the optimal combination for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.

VMs are moved to disk by esXpress and then tape backup can occur during normal business hours as no production VMs are affected. Tape data consists of VMs in their native state, consuming fewer tapes (up to 50%) and fewer resources associated with tapes (off-site storage fees, tape costs, and legacy agent licensing). Reduction in virtual machine backup times, together with faster restoration and reduced costs, represents the future of data protection.

Disaster Recovery tools such as NetBackup, BackupExec, TSM, Data Protector, Networker, Avamar, CommVault, Arcserve and others, provide effective protection against data loss, however, as virtualization progresses through the corporate environment, new backup tools are required. esXpress complements your existing DR implementation with the best Virtual to Disk Backup & Disaster Recovery solution in the industry.

Agent-Based Solutions and Tape Storage: The Shortcomings

Agent-based backup solutions solve critical needs in the current IT landscape. These solutions effectively quiesce applications while allowing users to continue to use those mission-critical applications on the physical server. Data stored on physical hosts must be protected and applications such as file servers, databases, and messaging, each povide unique challenges when it comes to backup.

Currently, the most cost-effective, off-site, backup storage medium is tape. And mature, agent-based backup solutions efficiently move data from disk to tape. While tape is not as fast for restoration as disk may be, tapes have the benefit of assuring backups are not on the physical premises in case of a disaster. Unfortunately, though, agent-based technologies have not been able to grow with virtualization. Recovery of an entire system with an agent-based backup preserves only the data—the entire system must be reloaded—including the operating system, applications, and the agent before any data can be restored.

Data Center DR: Best-of-Breed Solution

esXpress and legacy backup solutions work together to provide a best of breed solution for data center disaster recovery. Though legacy solutions provide effective backup of physical servers, as well as disk-to-tape solutions, esXpress provides the fastest backups from virtual machines to disk. Utilizing our date smart export directory, esXpress provides a direct path for legacy backups to take uncompressed native VMDK and VMX files to tape. Future restoration from tape is quick and easy as the esXpress software is not required for the restoration.

To achieve the lowest time-to-restoration in a virtual environment, block level backups utilizing VCB are often deployed. Unfortunately, VCB requires additional hardware and can not provide the number of concurrent streams necessary to meet backup windows.

Backups in a virtual environment should be performed with a solution tailored to the emerging virtualization technology. esXpress utilizes virtual machines to provide up to 16 concurrent backup streams direct to target per ESX host. Utilizing virtual machines requires no additional hardware or software licensing, and provides a superior level of fault-tolerance. In addition, each backup stream is compressed and deduplicated before the data ever leaves the host.

During VMworld 2009, PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the pioneering esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, announced the release of esXpress version 4.0.

This major new release of the most scalable and cost effective VMware backup solution on the market has added changed block tracking to reduce the amount of time and resources required to create backups and a unified central restore GUI to restore data faster and easier than ever before.
“PHD Virtual has developed an efficient solution for the data protection and recovery of virtual machines,” said Laura DuBois, program director, storage software, IDC. “By creating small virtual machines – virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – esXpress uses the virtual environment itself to perform the backups, eliminating the need for added hardware or software resources.”

The new esXpress version 4.0 adds enhanced support for VMware vSphere 4 in addition to ESX 3.x, including the ability to track changes to each VMDK using VMware’s change tracking API. By reading only the blocks that have changed, and not scanning the entire virtual disk each time a backup is performed, esXpress shortens the backup window and uses considerably less data I/O while also reducing overall loads on network and SAN resources.

“By utilizing the changed block data API to do incremental backups, esXpress 4.0 significantly reduces critical backup windows and lowers storage contention,” said Ron McKelvey, CTO, PHD Virtual. “This allows for greater scalability and more frequent backups to meet any virtual environment’s data protection objectives.”

esXpress is the first and only third-party solution that uses multiple virtual backup appliances to leverage the VMware changed block API. In addition to changed block tracking, esXpress 4.0 has also added the ability to initiate VM restores from within the Configuration and Deployment Virtual Appliance GUI. The GUI appliance provides unified management of virtual machine recovery tasks, bypassing the need to connect to each individual ESX host’s Service Console. Using this centralized interface, restoring data is simpler, faster, and more scalable than ever before.

Pricing and Availability
esXpress 4.0 is available now with pricing starting at $1,000 per host for four concurrent backup streams delivering the best price/performance for data recovery and protection in virtual environments. The product supports unlimited sockets and unlimited cores per host and no additional hardware is required.

You may also learn about esXpress by visiting PHD Virtual’s virtual VMworld booth: here

To download a free trial version of esXpress, please visit: http://www.phdvirtual.com/products/esxpress-virtual-backup

PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the pioneering esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, today announced that esXpress 3.6 has been extended to support VMware vSphere 4. This new release of esXpress also includes significant enhancements for all versions of VMware’s ESX platform version 3.0.2 and above.

An optimized deduplication engine dramatically increases backup speeds and fuels performance for file-level restores, as well as VMDK restores and data archival via a Windows Share.

“PHD Virtual’s esXpress was the first solution to truly take advantage of virtualization by intelligently using the virtual machine to back itself up,” said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst and consultant, Taneja Group. “With new support for vSphere, esXpress is a scalable, cost effective backup solution which can protect virtual environments without additional hardware or software investments.”



esXpress, with new support for vSphere 4, performs backup and recovery using the virtual environment itself. By creating virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – small virtual machines – the solution can be deployed in minutes on VMware servers, and provides the most scalable environment for backing up virtual machines.

New performance enhancements include:

1. Improved file level restore speeds are now up to four times faster
2. Data Restoration and Archival via Windows’ Shares are now up to four times faster
3. Improved PHDD deduplication image-level restore speeds up to twice as fast
4. Accelerated deduplication engine provides initial backups that are seeded at double the previous rates

esXpress continues to support up to 16 concurrent backup/restore streams per host and all backups can be self-restored without using esXpress or other proprietary virtual machine infrastructure. esXpress’ block level backups are de-duplicated source side, ensuring data is compressed and deduped before it every leaves the host. This ensures that network traffic is kept to a minimum even while backing up over a WAN link.

“Along with now supporting VMware vSphere 4, we continue to enhance esXpress’ performance so that all customers can benefit from these performance improvements in any VMware environment, 3.0.2 and above,” said Joe Julian, executive chairman, PHD Virtual. “esXpress continues to simplify backup and recovery for virtual machines while lowering costs by reducing hardware requirements. This helps organizations relying on their virtual infrastructure to receive unprecedented economies of scale, simplicity and management.”

Pricing and Availability

esXpress 3.6 supporting VMware vSphere 4, is currently available in small business and enterprise versions. Pricing starts at $1,000 per host with unlimited number of sockets. For more information or to download a trial version, please visit http://www.phdvirtual.com/products/esxpress-virtual-backup.

This weekend virtualization blogger Roy Mikes (of http://Mikes.eu)
was one of the first people online to release a product comparison
document comparing PHD Virtual’s groundbreaking backup solution esXpress 3.5 to other solutions, including Visioncore’s vRanger, Veeam Backup & Replication 3.1, and VMware vDR 1.0.

Roy can also be found on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/teovmy

You can also read the article here: http://virtualization-spotlight.com/roy-mikes-announces-esxpress-comparison-document/

Frank Van Egmond who blogs over at VMTN.nl posted an article looking at the great features in esXpress 3.5.6 on Monday.



The article covers “New in 3.5 features” including:

• Automatic deployment of esXpress
• Hierarchical and policy driven configuration
• Definable host groups with all hosts assigned to that group using the same standard configuration
• Hosts can inherit their configuration from global and group policies
• Host level overrides for esXpress configuration
• Centralized Backup Targets – create backup targets one time and assign to hosts and groups

We were also glad to see he noticed that you can use esXpress out of the box with multiple version of VMware, so there is no need to wait for a move vSphere 4 to use virtual technology to back up virtual machines! Nice one Frank!

Check out his blog here: http://www.vmtn.nl/