Availability of Xpress Restore Version 3.5 From FilesX

FilesX, Inc. announced the general availability of Xpress Restore version 3.5, its flagship disk-based, block-level data protection and disaster recovery (DR) platform. Staying true to its commitment to continually meet the growing and changing needs of its customers, the new release of Xpress Restore features the addition of dissimilar hardware support for Bare Metal Recovery (BMR), integrated protection for the backup server, simplified installation and other enhancements that enrich FilesX’ data protection and disaster recovery capabilities.

1. Dissimilar hardware support for BMR
“Bare Metal Recovery is one of several key technologies to ensuring fast and simple operational and disaster recovery,” said Enterprise Strategy Group Analyst Lauren Whitehouse. “Xpress Restore Bare Metal Recovery enables rapid recovery of applications and data to dissimilar hardware or to a virtual machine, which greatly reduces downtime in the event of a disruption.”
Xpress Restore’s support for almost any Microsoft Windows server hardware platform allows near-instant failover between physical servers, virtual servers or both. This new functionality provides for extremely cost-effective business continuity and resiliency by eliminating the need for maintaining a one-to-one, exact duplicate set of hardware. The dissimilar hardware BMR support in Xpress Restore 3.5 also serves as an excellent tool for application testing environments and for migrating from legacy to next-generation server platforms.
“We spent weeks testing Xpress Restore BMR and as we prepare to upgrade our HP blade servers, Xpress Restore will help us avoid a long, arduous and costly data migration process,” said Ned Euwer, systems and network engineer for The Austin Diagnostic Clinic. “We can simply failover to the new blades. To facilitate the migration to HP c-Class BladeSystems and to host the Xpress Restore repository, we purchased a SB600c AiO Storage Blade, because of its ease-of-use capabilities that require little storage expertise.”
As part of the HP Developer and Solution Partner Program, FilesX Xpress Restore is supported on HP servers and storage. With the broad portfolio of HP StorageWorks SAN and NAS solutions, FilesX can provide the scalability and flexibility for a complete information lifecycle management solution.
“Hewlett Packard is pleased to be working with FilesX to bring our mutual customers next-generation data management solutions that improve critical application performance, reliability and accessibility while reducing costs,” said Ron Eller, HP vice president of alliances. “FilesX is a valued and active member of our ILM, Integrity and BladeSystem Business Partner programs and we look forward to their continued participation.”

2. Integrated protection for the backup server through “Co-habitation”
Xpress Restore 3.5 provides the ability to install a backup client on the same server as the backup repository. This capability is ideal for multifunction storage server systems such as the HP StorageWorks AiO that require both on-board and disaster recovery protection. This also has particular appeal to small office environments where there is only one server and adding a separate backup server is not warranted.

3. Simplified installation and configuration
Xpress Restore 3.5 offers wizard-based installation for the application server, the backup server, and the centralized DR server. These new wizards greatly improve the speed and accuracy of installing the various Xpress Restore components throughout the environment, based on best-in-class practices observed in hundreds of FilesX client installations.
4. 64-bit support
Instant restore capabilities for individual files and entire volumes for x64 and IA64 platforms have been added in Xpress Restore Version 3.5.

5. New alert notifications
Policy-based alerts will trigger an alert e-mail when Xpress Restore detects problems in the backup and DR processes. Alerts can be customized to meet the specific needs of administrators and system managers.

6. Enhanced disaster recovery
Additionally, FilesX has incorporated a wide range of performance and robustness enhancements to the Xpress Restore-DR module, enabling far more data to be selectively replicated between remote offices, data centers and disaster recovery sites using existing WAN bandwidth. These improvements include: