Quest Upgrades VRanger For Quicker Data Backup In VM Environments

Quest Software has introduced version 5.2 of its vRanger software for data backup and recovery in VMware virtual environments. The vRanger line provides support for virtual machine data backup in the VMware ESX hypervisor environment and in the environment of its successor, ESXi, and a Quest executive says version 5.2 adds support for VMware’s HotAdd feature that offers faster speeds for doing ESXi backups.

Quest is trying to distinguish itself from legacy physical server backup software from Symantec, CommVault and EMC with the vRanger’s "virtual-centric" offering, says John Maxwell, VP of data protection product management for Quest Software. Maxwell says vRanger backs up data on virtual machines (VMs) without the need to install a software agent on each VM.

"With ESXi, vRanger and other products have filled a hole left by traditional backup vendors, providing a best-of-breed VM-centric approach to virtual machine backup," he says.

Version 5.2. also adds support for HotAdd, a feature of ESXi that enables easier setup and execution of VM data backups. With HotAdd, vRanger 5.2. takes a snapshot of all the data on as many as 20 VMs on either a Fibre Channel storage area network environment or on a virtual LAN.

"You do a snapshot of each VM and then back up the snapshot," Maxwell explains. "It’s a very elegant way and a high-performance way of doing a backup of your data."

In March Quest Software surveyed its 38,000 customers and found that customers virtualize, on average, 77% of their infrastructure, which is higher than the industry average.Version 5.2 maintains some of the main features of previous versions of vRanger, including parallel job execution for faster completion of backup jobs, indexing of backup files to negate the need to buy third-party indexing software, automatic scheduling of backup jobs and the provision of alerts to administrators when newly created VMs are ready to use.

Research firm IDC recently listed Quest Software as the No. 3 vendor, by market share, in virtual server management software in 2010, behind No. 1 VMware and No. 2 Microsoft. IDC forecasts that the market will total $1.4 billion in revenue by 2015, representing a five-year compound annual growth rate of 11.1%.

However, IDC’s Mary Johnston-Turner, the author of the report, emphasized in an e-mail that the virtual server management software report did not cover virtual data backup, which is the focus of Quest’s vRanger product.

Quest’s Maxwell said the vRanger version 5.2 would likely be of interest to Quest customers currently using 4.x versions of the software.

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