StoneFly DR365 Appliance With Backup-to-VM Conversion

StoneFly, Inc. (wholly-owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, Inc.) announced the second generation of their DR365 ‘DR Site in a Box’ total backup and DR appliance that consolidates all servers, storage appliances and backup systems into one appliance.

Featuring an enterprise backup management engine, every backup image is automatically converted into a VM. In the event that a server or workstation fails, the VM copy of that system can be spun up and hosted directly on the appliance while the failed machine is repaired. This attribute is paramount for BC of production environments as well as non-invasive compliance testing as replica VMs of running physical or virtual systems can be spun up at any time, from any point in time.

The DR365 now supports P2P, P2V, V2P, and V2V operations (Physical-to-Physical, Physical-to-Virtual, Virtual-to-Physical, Virtual-to-Virtual) including restoring physical machines to different set of hardware and restoring VMs to a different Hypervisor. backups and recovery can be highly granular down to the file and folder level, or vigorous to include a full disk image for bare metal recovery of a system including the OS, configurations, applications, data and more.

“DR365 is the Swiss Army knife of backup appliances. It is a must for every business, from small to enterprise,” said Mo Tahmasebi, president and CEO, StoneFly.

It provides a backup solution for all of an office or datacenter’s physical and virtual servers and workstations in a single box. Backup agents support a multitude of environments, including Windows servers and workstations, VMware, Hyper-V, Xenserver, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Oracle VM, as well as multiple flavors of Linux including Red Hat, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Debian, CentOS and more. VMware ESX/ESXi and Hyper-V servers implement agentless backups where the agent is installed only on the Hypervisor and not the actual VMs. Specialized backup agents for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and Active Directory provide recovery down to an individual email message or database table.

It is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution to consolidate an entire datacenter into one appliance and manage all of the backup operations for the datacenter or office with a single central management console. The patented advanced storage virtualization services integrated gives it the flexibility to replace the ‘fixed hardware model’ of the past with on-demand resource allocation (such as CPU, memory, storage, etc.) based on individual application needs.

Existing Windows and Linux physical or VMs can be migrated into VMs running on the appliance, and their hardware retired to reduce the datacenter’s hardware footprint and run many more applications on much less hardware. Use of virtualized OSs allows for hardware utilization and reduction in power and cooling costs. In addition to backup and datacenter consolidation, the appliances can also be used for enterprise iSCSI (or optional NAS) storage for other physical and VMs.

The features include over 2,500 delta-based snapshots with read-write snapshot volumes per appliance, thin provisioning with space reclamation, dynamic volume management, optimized block level parallel data dedupe with a high-performance index engine, and real-time synchronous replication (campus mirroring). Optional features include multi-site/multi-appliance asynchronous replication, hardware-enabled block level AES 256 volume encryption, scale out NAS support for CIFS/SMB and NFS protocols, and VSS database agent support.

It can be configured to mirror in real-time to a second appliance on campus and/or replicate to an appliance at a remote site or in the cloud for a DR solution for an entire enterprise. Hot-swappable power supply modules, disk drives, RAID protection with battery backup and iSCSI port failover ensure each system’s availability. Each node ships with up to 24 storage virtualization engine cores, up to 1TB of high-speed system memory, and scales up to 256 tiered SATA, SAS or SSD drives per solution.