Quest Software suggests that organizations are using two or more backup products to protect their physical and virtual machines. Justifying its most recent product launch on the basis of this "finding", the company has enhanced its Ranger virtual data protection solution to its version 6.0 release.
Aiming to provide a "single source" VMware-powered backup across both environments, vRanger 6.0 spans physical and virtual environments and also provides a chance to back up and restore physical Windows servers.
Quest says that vRanger 6.0 enables physical server backup by deploying distributed agents that send data directly from source to repository. This engineering is intended to improve scalability by eliminating an extra step and bottlenecks in the backup process.
VMware Ready certified for vSphere 5, vRanger 6.0 provides OS support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008. Its development team also confirms that it will support Windows Server 2012 upon its release to market. In addition, vRanger 6.0 provides application-consistent snapshot backups for a number of Microsoft applications, including Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Active Directory via Microsoft's VSS.
"While vRanger was among the first innovators of virtualization-specific protection, it's great to see Quest adding physical server protection as well. Customers who wholly embrace virtualization can often face a challenge when their preferred data protection solution is virtualization-only, and are forced to use a second tool to protect their few remaining physical servers," said Jason Buffington, senior analyst on Data Protection at Enterprise Strategy Group.
"With these new capabilities, vRanger customers will be able to enjoy a single solution for their whole environment. Quest's new capabilities and future roadmap align well with what ESG is seeing in trends towards unified protection of physical and virtual, among other data protection modernization trends," he added.
"Unlike legacy physical backup solutions, vRanger was architected specifically for the virtual environment, and unlike niche, virtualization-only backup solutions, it now provides the ability to protect the physical machines organizations have yet to virtualize. We believe this functionality fills a major gap in the backup market," said John Maxwell, vice president of product management, data protection, Quest Software.
