Vizioncore FlashRestore Runs VMs From Archive

Vizioncore has announced plans for FlashRestore, which allows VMware servers to boot virtual machines from the vRanger back-up device rather then restoring to a hypervisor before booting. The feature should be available later 2010. Currently, recovery of virtual machine (VM) images requires that the entire Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) file be copied from the backup repository to the hypervisor system over the network, which can take hours depending the disk size and network capacity. With FlashRestore for vRanger Pro, images are available for use by applications from the repository, and users can continue working while the VMDK file is relocated using VMware Storage VMotion from the backup repository.

"[Flash Restore] is something I'm looking forward to using," says Andrew Gahm, systems and security engineer for South Jersey Healthcare, a coalition of three hospitals and doctors' offices, based in Bridgeton, N.J. The organization has been using vRanger Pro for about a year and a half. The FlashRestore functionality would enable him to restore corrupted servers from the previous night's backup, Gahm says.

When South Jersey Healthcare recently had a server problem, users were down for 45 minutes, Gahm says. With the FlashRestore functionality, "I could have saved 20 minutes instantly by running from backup, and then in the background we could VMotion it over and keep it up and running."

"The ability to recover in place, or without having to transfer data across a network is a critical capability for companies to meet their recovery time and recovery point objectives," says George Crump, lead analyst for the Storage Switzerland analyst company and a Network Computing contributor. "There are other ways to do this, but I don't think I have seen the process so tightly integrated as how Vizioncore is doing it."

On a side note, Vizioncore, a subsidiary of Quest Software, will also become part of the Quest Software virtualization management business unit, along with Surgient Technologies, which Quest acquired recently.