University of Maryland Deploys PHD Virtual

PHD Virtual Technologies, Inc. announced that the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES), is using itsVirtual Backup Appliance (VBA) with its patent pending Rollback Recovery feature, for VM data protection and DR of its 150 VMs.

Because an upgrade of a previous vendor’s backup system caused UMES personnel to babysit backups for hours at a time, the university searched for a new partner. In a multi-vendor comparison, PHD Virtual Backup beat out several other virtual backup providers because of its ease of use and software GUI as well as better client support.

PHD has allowed UMES to streamline backup operations.
Before PHD, UMES had three different solutions installed to perform various backup, and DR functions. One vendor was used for their Windows machines, but it did not support Linux very well. So UMES used another vendor for Linux. Neither vendor was adequate for their offsite strategy, so they needed a third backup product to take data off to tape periodically. In the end, UMES was spending too much time maintaining the different solutions and none of them had the efficiency and speed of recovery like virtualization-focused vendor PHD.

PHD provided them with fast local backups for both Windows and Linux VMs, and an automated offsite archive that was easier to manage and provided recovery benefits.

Also, due to backup speed and performance, UMES is able to take more backups of critical systems that change frequently like databases; and keep more of them. This has strengthened their day-to-day restore capabilities, and their long-term archiving strategy.

UMES also utilizes Rollback Recovery to ‘rollback’ to the appropriate moment if a mistake, loss or outage takes place. They have already tested this feature when a PeopleSoft developer lost some data and they were able to restore the system to the point in time when the data was lost.

“I am very impressed with PHD Virtual Backup, in fact, I love it. It is so easy to use,” said Karen Elliott, systems administrator, UMES. “I wanted to get a gut feeling throughout the evaluation process about which company would provide the best support. It was immediately obvious that PHD would be the company that would excel there.”

“UMES really liked the tight integration with the virtual environment due to our virtual appliance architecture and vCenter plug-ins,” said Joe Noonan, senior product manager, PHD Virtual. “They used to spend eight or nine hours on the weekend babysitting backups associated with three other backup solutions. Now, they spend five minutes checking the email reports.“