Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 and beyond – A glimpse of Roadmap 2021!

About Vembu BDR Suite:

Vembu BDR Suite is a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solution designed to protect the data across diverse IT environments that include virtual (VMware, Hyper-V), physical (Windows, Linux, Mac), cloud workloads (AWS, Azure) and SaaS applications (Office 365, G Suite), all from a central console.

We’re excited about taking Vembu BDR Suite to the next level.

Vembu BDR Suite – Roadmap 2021 is tailored based on customer feedback, business-orientated use cases, and also keeping up with evolving industry standards. The plan includes a plethora of new features added to each Backup Module (Virtual, Physical, Cloud, SaaS Applications) and Infrastructure Module. We have also added a few essential management features that cater to Service Providers.

In this post, we’ll be giving you a glimpse of the major release – Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 & beyond. Read ahead to know more about the new features included in each module.

Backup for VMware and Hyper-V:

1. Hyper-V VM replication – We currently support VM replication for VMware VMs and are expanding our support for Hyper-V VM replication in v5.0. With this feature, you can create and maintain exact copies of your source Hyper-V VMs (Replica VM) on another Hyper-V host in the DR site. In a disaster scenario, you can failover to Replica VM and continue your business operations. This ensures High Availability for your VMs against hardware and operating system outages.
2. Backup VMs from multiple hosts and hypervisors in a single backup job – Until now, you can only configure backup for VMs across different hosts only if it’s in Cluster. With this option, you will be able to add virtual machines across multiple hosts and hypervisors in a single backup job and configure backups for them easily.
3. Run custom Pre/Post backup scripts at the job level, VM level, etc. – We already support running Pre/Post backup scripts at the job level for Windows Disk Image backups. Now, we extend support to run Pre/Post backup scripts at Job and VM level for VMware and Hyper-V VM backups, which can be used to create an application-consistent backup for VMs running applications that do not support Microsoft VSS. Example: My SQL.
4. Parallel VM Processing – This feature allows multiple VMs to be processed simultaneously for better performance during backup.
5. Configure VM backup order – This feature lets you set the order in which the VMs must be processed for backup. This allows you to first run the backup of critical VMs added to your job.

Backup for Physical Machines:

1. Linux disk-image backup – At this time, we only support file-level backups for Linux machines and we bring in image backups for Linux machines to backup the entire machine including OS, Applications, and data.
2. Parallel Disk Processing – This feature allows multiple disks of a Windows machine to be processed simultaneously for better performance during backup

Application-level Backup:

Currently, Vembu BDR Suite supports Application-level backup for MS Applications only and extends support for Oracle RMAN, SAP HANA, and PostgreSQL. It supports automatic backup scheduling, reliable backup, faster recovery, and improved RTOs for your applications. With this, you can eliminate the complexity of scripting to backup these enterprise applications.

1. Oracle RMAN Backup – Integrated with Oracle RMAN to effectively and consistently backup the Oracle databases and quickly restore the databases you need directly from the backup.
2. SAP HANA Backup – Perform a transactionally consistent backup of SAP HANA databases and logs. You can quickly restore your data whenever you need and ensure the availability of your application.
3. PostgreSQL Backup – Backup your PostgreSQL database system in a consistent state and reduce the downtime of your application by performing a fast granular recovery of your data.

Backup for SaaS Applications:

1. Backup for Office 365 – You can currently back up the user mailboxes, contacts, calendars, and OneDrive data from Microsoft Office 365 account. In addition, v5.0 will support backup for Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 Teams.
   • Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online Backup – Vembu Backup for Office 365 is integrated with SharePoint APIs which allows for automated scheduled backups and granular restores of the entire sites, site collections, individual files, folders, and entire document libraries.
   • Microsoft 365 Teams Backup – Backup all of your business-critical files, conversations, chats, planner, and tasks within Teams and flexibly restore the required data.
2. Backup for G Suite – It is currently in the Beta version. In v5.0, Backup for G Suite will be available for production use with some new features, and enhancements.

Recovery Module:

1. Live Recovery to AWS and Azure – With this feature, you can restore the image-based backup of Virtual and Physical machines as an Amazon EC2 instance or Azure Virtual Machine. This is also helpful in migrating virtual/physical machines from the on-premises infrastructure to the Cloud directly from the backup.
2. Finalizing Instant Boot VM – Instantly Booted Virtual/Physical Machines as VMs can be finalized and used as a production VM without having to create a separate virtual machine. This helps to avoid the downtime when restoring the VM from backup storage to VM datastore.

Backup & General Infrastructure Module:

1. Backup Job Policy/template – With this option, you can create the frequently used backup configuration settings as a template and can be used when creating a new backup job with the same settings.
2. Active Directory discovery and automation for bulk deployment – This feature allows AD integration with Vembu BDR Backup Server to ease the process of Host discovery and bulk agent deployment on each machine automatically without any manual intervention. Businesses using Microsoft AD for resource management, authentication can leverage this feature for ease of management.
3. Secondary backup copy – This feature allows you to create a secondary copy of the backup data and store it in a storage medium on another location or on object-based cloud storage.
   • NAS or external storage devices
   • AWS S3, Azure Blob, S3 compatible storage
4. Centralized Management of Files & Applications backup – With this option, the File and Application backup can be configured and managed centrally from the BDR backup server. In the current deployment, you need to manually install Vembu Client on each machine and configure backup from the client console. This eases the management and monitoring of File & Application Backup jobs.
5. Storage proxy to distribute the BDR/Offsite DR server workloads – Vembu Storage Proxy accesses the backup repository directly, rather than interfering with BDR Backup Server or Offsite DR Server which reduces the impact on the servers by distributing the workloads to the proxy.
6. Rotated drives as Backup Repository – You can use multiple external hard drives and swap them on a regular basis to store the backup data.
7. Where-it-Left-Off Backups – With this option, the image-based backups can be directly sent to offsite locations over WAN or intermittent network as it supports stateful backups where any backup data sent already will not be sent again and any backup schedule will always start from where the previous schedule left off if the previous schedule was interrupted. This saves you the time required to start over from scratch.
8. BDR Backup Server Cluster & Load Balancing – You can easily deploy multiple Vembu BDR Backup Servers and create a cluster out of it to achieve a higher level of availability and scalability.
9. Synthetic full backup – Currently, Vembu supports Full Backup and Incremental Backup. From v5.0, you can schedule synthetic full backup which is identical to a regular full backup but it is created from the recent full backup and its subsequent incremental backup. This reduces the time taken to do an active full backup from the source machine and also allows for faster restores.
10. Advanced backup retention including GFS – Retain the backup data for a longer period of time (weeks/months/years) while using the storage space efficiently with Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) retention policy.
11. Configuration of Preferred Networks for Backups – With this option, you can choose over which network you want the Vembu BDR Backup Server to perform the backup operations. This helps in improving the performance of backups by routing traffic to a non-production network in your environment.
12. Simplification of licensing & license administration – Improved user experience through simplified licensing and its management. You will have a central, transparent & secure license management portal for full visibility and control to all the Vembu BDR Suite licenses of your business.

There are some more features in the Infrastructure module that includes Extensive Improvements in Backup Performance, and Extensive Enhancements in Reports.

New Features for Service Providers:

1. Comprehensive Multi-tenancy support – This feature allows you to seamlessly manage all your customer backup environments from a single console through setting up groups, assigning backup repositories, and customized reports for each customer. This also allows you to effectively offer a self administrative Backup and DR service to your customer base by creating separate logins and roles for each of your customers to manage/monitor their backup infrastructure.
2. Centralized Management – Ability to centrally manage and monitor multiple Vembu BDR Backup Servers distributed across multiple locations through a common user interface with extensive reporting capabilities.

More to Come…

A wide array of new features have been incorporated in v5.0 & beyond along with more enhancements and bug fixes to improve the overall user experience, product performance to deliver an exceptional and comprehensive backup and DR solution for your IT environment.

The Early Access Build of Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 will be available soon.

We encourage you to download and evaluate the product in your environment. We are all ears for your feedback and new feature requests.

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