PHD Virtual Extends esXpress (Starting at $1,000 Per Host)

PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, announced that esXpress has been extended to support VMware vSphere 4.

This new release of esXpress version 3.6 also includes significant enhancements for all versions of VMware’s ESX platform version 3.0.2 and above. An optimized deduplication engine dramatically increases backup speeds and fuels performance for file-level restores, as well as VMDK restores and data archival via a Windows Share.

"PHD Virtual’s esXpress was the first solution to truly take advantage of virtualization by intelligently using the virtual machine to back itself up," said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst and consultant, Taneja Group. "With new support for vSphere, esXpress is a scalable, cost effective backup solution which can protect virtual environments without additional hardware or software investments."

esXpress, with new support for vSphere 4, performs backup and recovery using the virtual environment itself. By creating virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – small virtual machines – the solution can be deployed in minutes on VMware servers, and provides the most scalable environment for backing up virtual machines.

New performance enhancements include:

• Improved file level restore speeds are now up to four times faster
• Data Restoration and Archival via Windows’ Shares are now up to four times faster
• Improved PHDD deduplication image-level restore speeds up to twice as fast
• Accelerated deduplication engine provides initial backups that are seeded at double the previous rates

esXpress continues to support up to 16 concurrent backup/restore streams per host and all backups can be self-restored without using esXpress or other proprietary virtual machine infrastructure. esXpress’ block level backups are de-duplicated source side, ensuring data is compressed and deduped before it every leaves the host. This ensures that network traffic is kept to a minimum even while backing up over a WAN link.

"Along with now supporting VMware vSphere 4, we continue to enhance esXpress’ performance so that all customers can benefit from these performance improvements in any VMware environment, 3.0.2 and above," said Joe Julian, executive chairman, PHD Virtual. "esXpress continues to simplify backup and recovery for virtual machines while lowering costs by reducing hardware requirements. This helps organizations relying on their virtual infrastructure to receive unprecedented economies of scale, simplicity and management."

Pricing and Availability
esXpress 3.6 supporting VMware vSphere 4 is currently available in small business and enterprise versions. Pricing starts at $1,000 per host with unlimited number of sockets.