Zmanda, a provider of open source backup and recovery software, has upgraded its flagship backup and recovery management product, targeted at SMBs and departmental customers. New features include support for virtualized environments.
Amanda Enterprise Version 3.1 "is a major release for us," Chander Kant, chief executive officer, Zmanda, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "There are some major features that have been available in the very high end of software - high end from a cost perspective; those are now being made available through Amanda Enterprise, at anywhere from one-tenth to one-twentieth the cost and complexity of some other software."
Zmanda also announced the availability of the Disaster Recovery (DR) Option for Amanda Enterprise. This option enables IT managers to create a remote disaster recovery solution by replicating the backup server itself, avoiding the need to replicate each individual data set, thus reducing the cost of DR. Data from all critical platforms and applications can be replicated without having to buy and deploy replication technology for each platform and application.
With the addition of NDMP support, Amanda Enterprise 3.1 now delivers high performance backup and recovery of network attached storage devices such as NetApp Storage Systems. NDMP allows the backup data to be transported directly from the NAS device to the backup device without passing through the Amanda Enterprise server, speeding up backups in many environments, and reducing the backup window, as well as minimizes the demands placed on the corporate LAN.
VMware Hypervisor support allows Amanda Enterprise users to efficiently manage the backups of virtual environments. Now users can take an image-level backup of the entire virtual machine from the Amanda server without the need to install client software on each individual virtual machine.
"Our strategy is to make the process of backup and disaster recovery more accessible to small and medium-size companies - and we do it in a couple of different ways - by providing these features at a low cost and complexity, as well as by supporting platforms that other vendors may not support - for example, MySQL," says Kant. "Another one is Postgres - so if you are a Postgres DBA, now you can back up Postgres using all the various technologies that we support."
In addition to providing visual backup reporting through the web-based Zmanda Management Console, Amanda Enterprise 3.1 adds support for exporting backup reports in XML schema, opening up the reports to be integrated with various reporting and management tools. Amanda Enterprise 3.1 also adds Microsoft Exchange 2010 support -in addition to the currently supported applications and platforms.
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