PHD Virtual Releases esXpress 4.0 With Changed Block Tracking and Unified Central Restore GUI

During VMworld 2009, PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, announced the release of esXpress version 4.0. This new release of the scalable and cost effective VMware backup solution on the market has added changed block tracking to reduce the amount of time and resources required to create backups and a unified central restore GUI to restore data faster and easier than ever before.

"PHD Virtual has developed an efficient solution for the data protection and recovery of virtual machines," said Laura DuBois, program director, storage software, IDC. "By creating small virtual machines – virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – esXpress uses the virtual environment itself to perform the backups, eliminating the need for added hardware or software resources."

The new esXpress version 4.0 adds enhanced support for VMware vSphere 4 in addition to ESX 3.x, including the ability to track changes to each VMDK using VMware’s change tracking API. By reading only the blocks that have changed, and not scanning the entire virtual disk each time a backup is performed, esXpress shortens the backup window and uses considerably less data I/O while also reducing overall loads on network and SAN resources.

"By utilizing the changed block data API to do incremental backups, esXpress 4.0 significantly reduces critical backup windows and lowers storage contention," said Ron McKelvey, CTO, PHD Virtual. "This allows for greater scalability and more frequent backups to meet any virtual environment’s data protection objectives."

esXpress is the first and only third-party solution that uses multiple virtual backup appliances to leverage the VMware changed block API. In addition to changed block tracking, esXpress 4.0 has also added the ability to initiate VM restores from within the Configuration and Deployment Virtual Appliance GUI. The GUI appliance provides unified management of virtual machine recovery tasks, bypassing the need to connect to each individual ESX host’s Service Console. Using this centralized interface, restoring data is simpler, faster, and more scalable than ever before.

Pricing and Availability
esXpress 4.0 is available now with pricing starting at $1,000 per host for four concurrent backup streams delivering the best price/performance for data recovery and protection in virtual environments. The product supports unlimited sockets and unlimited cores per host and no additional hardware is required.