Zmanda Optimized Cloud Backup Solution for EU

Zmanda announced the second generation of its Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) product. ZCB 2.0 includes the ability to constrain data storage to a storage cloud physically located in the European Union.

This enables organizations based in the European Union (EU) to maintain compliance with the EU Data Protection Directive (EUDPD).

EUDPD standardizes the protection of data privacy for citizens throughout the EU by providing baseline requirements. For practical purposes, the EUDPD restricts most organizations based in the EU from transferring any personal information outside the European Union.

By utilizing the new geography control feature, users can select the specific geography where they would like backup data to be stored in order to ensure optimal disaster recovery protection. Customers in other geographies can also direct their data to the storage cloud located in Europe to enable geographic disaster recovery.

ZCB 2.0 also includes other new features such as cloud backup of MySQL and SharePoint; selective restore; and security and performance enhancements, making it the most functionally advanced cloud backup solution on the market for the Windows system administrators.

ZCB 2.0 is ideal for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that need a comprehensive yet easy-to-use Windows backup solution for backup and disaster recovery of Windows File Servers, SQL Servers, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Oracle and MySQL.

Selective restore capabilities were also added which allow users to recover an individual file from a large directory rather than having to restore the entire directory to recover a single file.

Finally, Windows Security Certificate-based encryption has been added for backup archives to provide familiar but iron-clad security of data residing on the cloud.

"ZCB 2.0 further solidifies our leadership in the Windows-based cloud backup space," said Chander Kant, chief executive officer, Zmanda. "ZCB provides users with the assurance that their entire Windows environment, from soup-to-nuts, is protected in the event of a disaster and can be restored to any location with Internet access."

ZCB is a simple GUI-based backup solution that allows Windows users to easily automate their backup and recovery process. This robust yet simple-to-use solution provides ongoing protection against disaster, user error and theft. Once ZCB is installed and the backup process is set using its simple scheduler, ZCB automatically backs up files, applications, databases, and networked devices to a storage cloud. The management console allows system administrators to schedule the extraction of backup data from live applications and the upload of backup archives to the storage cloud as independently scheduled operations, thus reducing the burden of backup operations on production applications and WAN bandwidth. ZCB can also be used to protect either physical or virtual machines. The backups are stored in a native format, giving users the option to access and reuse their files even without ZCB.

The price for ZCB 2.0 with a basic service level agreement (SLA) consists of a flexible pay-as-you-go cost of $0.25/GB/month ($0.20/GB/Month for US) for data transfer and storage on the cloud, plus a monthly charge of $4.95 per account for the protection of an unlimited number of Windows servers. ZCB is immediately available for purchase and can be download.