Acrosync: Vertical Backup 1.0 Network and Cloud Backup Tool for vSphere Hypervisor

Acrosync LLC announced Vertical Backup 1.0, a network and cloud backup tool for vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi).

It can backup VMs running on ESXi to local or NFS drives, SFTP servers, and NAS boxes, as well as a number of cloud storage services including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Backblaze B2. It works with free or unlicensed ESXi, and can perform live backup without stopping the VM.

Vertical Backup pioneers a fully incremental approach based on the principal of lock-free deduplication. All backups created are incremental in nature, yet each incremental backup behaves as a full backup in the sense that any of them can be individually deleted or restored without depending on others. This eliminates the need of recurring full backups after the initial backup as required by many existing ESXi backup tools.

In addition, Vertical Backup is capable of achieving a high level of deduplication. Multiple ESXi hosts being backed up can upload to the same network or cloud storage. Any duplicate chunks from any of these ESXi hosts are only stored once in the storage. This saves backup time, network bandwidth, and storage costs in scenarios where multiple VMs based on the same initial image are deployed to different hosts, or where VMs are replicated from one host to another.

“Exploiting cross-host deduplication in presence of a proprietary storage server is not a hard problem.” explains Gilbert Chen, founder, Acrosync. “What is hard is to support this kind of deduplication while allowing backups to be stored on general-purpose storage servers unaware of any deduplication mechanism. We came up with a clever way to solve this hard problem, and this is why Vertical Backup can have extensive cloud support without giving up any advanced features essential for a modern backup tool.”

Features:

• No server components: work with many storage servers out-of-box

• Live backup: no need to stop the VM when performing a backup

• Fully incremental backup: while each backup is incremental, it behaves like a full backup for easy restore and deletion

• Deduplication: duplicate blocks from the same or different hosts are stored on the storage only once

• Compression: blocks are stored in a compressed format to further reduce storage space

• Client-side encryption: encrypt blocks before uploading them to storage

• Independent deletion: every backup can be deleted independently without affecting other backups

• Individual restoration: every backup can be restored individually without depending on other backups

• Email notifications: send email notifications after a backup is finished

• Scheduled jobs: schedule a backup job that runs every hour, daily, or any customized schedule

System requirements: vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 5.1, 5.5, 6.0, and 6.5

Pricing and availability:
Vertical Backup adopts a simple subscription model where a license costs $99 per host per year. It also comes with a free 30-day fully-functional trial.