VMBlog had an interview recently with Nagarajan, Product Manager, Vembu BDR Suite and the discussion was about latest updates about Vembu’s offering and their roadmap as well.
VMblog: You recently announced a new offering of Vembu BDR Suite. Can you tell us more about this latest version?
Nagarajan: Absolutely! Vembu’s latest offering is Vembu BDR Suite v3.6 which is aimed to make Backup, Recovery and DR even simpler to use than the previous releases. The forte of Vembu BDR Suite is its comprehensive nature and how it aims to cater to the backup of the entire data center. There are options to select the entire ESXi hosts, vCenter servers & Hyper-V servers at the host level. So, any newly created VMs will be added automatically for backup and deleted VMs will be removed from the backup job automatically. We’ve also added options to manually exclude or include VMs from VMware and Hyper-V Backups, and options to exclude specific disks from VMware / Hyper-V Backups. We’ve also added a Quick VM Recovery for an ESXi host to instantly recover the backed up VMs to any VMware ESXi host, as well as the ability to control bandwidth usage between a Backup Server and an OffsiteDR Server using a Bandwidth Throttling feature. These are just a few of the new features that we’ve added into the latest version that makes the entire process simpler than ever before.
VMblog: You’ve told me in the past that frequent updates and new releases are important to you. How does that affect your customers?
Nagarajan: Every technology needs updating and in no time, a technology can become obsolete. We are constantly in touch with our customers, and we make enhancements to our products based on their valuable feedback. Also, our dedicated R&D team keeps watch on the changing trends and they provide us with insights about the upcoming technologies which can make up the entire process of Backup & DR in line with the changing trends. We have simplified the software update process through our automatic s/w update feature. So, customers can upgrade their BDR installations without affecting the production environment. Also, the major upgrades and minor updates are provided free of charge to our existing customers.
VMblog: Can you give us some background around your company’s innovation process?
Nagarajan: We believe that any innovation we do needs to provide value add to our customers. Our R&D team closely monitors the trends in the backup industry and makes sure that the features that we offer in our releases are in-line with the requirements of a customer. At the same time, we also believe in forecasting requirements and making sure we build toward them.
Every feature that is added or any solution that has been developed is based on the careful study of customer expectations and requirements. For example, as per our research, we found out that there are a lot of data centers which use two or more backup products, and they are on the lookout for a single and comprehensive solution. Vembu BDR Suite fills that gap which proves the very fact that our innovation has benefitted the end users.
VMblog: Talk about your immediate road map and how it addresses the evolving technologies.
Nagarajan: We are working to provide multi-tenancy and centralized management in our immediate releases. This will help our customers to manage and monitor their data center backup and DR seamlessly. We are also trying to reduce the RTO for cloud DR use cases, such as, recovering the backed up VMs or physical machines on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
VMblog: How do you intend to maintain costs as you bring in higher-end technologies into your products in the near future?
Nagarajan: Well, the cost factor comes into play as we pay our technology partners in the name of procuring APIs. We decide the license costs based on the same and on the market benchmark. However, our current pricing is considered 50% cheaper than other premium backup vendors in the market. Having said that, we intend to keep our prices in check while supporting futuristic technologies.
VMblog: Can you brief us about your next major release and discuss the features that you plan to offer?
Nagarajan: Vembu BDR v4.0 will be our next major release with lots of new features and enhancements. I’ll list a couple of the more interesting features here to give you a better sense of the next release:
- Tape Device Support – Vembu will support native tape devices for data archival. Because there are still a lot of businesses that would like to implement a 3-2-1 approach for backup data storage, Vembu has decided to support the tape storage devices for secondary storage targets.
- Storage Snapshots Level Backup – Vembu is also working with major storage vendors to support backup from storage snapshots. This will cause a tremendous improvement in the backup performance without negatively affecting the performance of the production VMs.
Interested in trying Vembu BDR suite?, Try Now on a 30-days free trial: https://www.bdrsuite.com/vembu-bdr-suite-download/
Got questions? Email us at: vembu-support@vembu.com for answers.
Follow our Twitter and Facebook feeds for new releases, updates, insightful posts and more.
