Vembu VMBackup for vSphere, that’s who.
I’ll be honest, when a data protection company called Vembu reached out to me last month I have to admit I had not heard of them before. Despite working neck deep in the virtualization world for the last 10 years and have attended every VMworld the last 9 years Vembu is a company I had never heard mentioned. A big part of the reason for that is Vembu is based out of India and initially focused on the managed service provider (MSP) market by providing their StoreGrid software for MSPs to white-label and re-brand to offer as a service to customers. Even ESG has declared Vembu as “The Biggest Little Data Protection Company You Probably Haven’t Heard Of (Yet)”.
Vembu has actually been around for over 12 years and I’m going to tell you a little bit about them. Vembu is a privately held data protection company based in India who recently opened an office in Texas and is now trying to expand their presence to the customer segment. To that end in late 2014, they shifted focus from the MSP market to developing their BDR Suite which is a collection of products meant for on-premise, offsite, cloud backup and disaster recovery across diverse IT environments including physical, virtual, applications and endpoints.
The Vembu BDR Suite caters to the backup needs of the modern data center running VMware/Hyper-V (Vembu VMBackup) as well as physical Windows IT environments (Vembu ImageBackup). They continue to provide all the features of Vembu StoreGrid under the Vembu NetworkBackup product name which is also part of Vembu BDR Suite. They have a couple of products for VMware environments which includes VMBackup for VMware, OffsiteDR for VMware and BDR360 for VMware. VMBackup for VMware has pretty much everything you would expect a backup application to have and more such as:
- Agentless VMware Image Backup
- VM Replication for High Availability
- VMware Hot-Add and SAN transport mode for LAN free data transfer
- CBT enabled incremental data transfer using VMware VADP
- Supports VMware vSphere v6 which includes VMware Virtual Volumes and Virtual SAN
- Quick VM Recovery
- Application-Aware Image Backups
- VembuHIVE File System, a File System of File Systems for efficient backup storage
- Flexible & Configurable Retention Policies
- Vembu Universal Explorer for Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Active Directory and SharePoint
They also provide value added features such as automated backup verification, quick VM recovery from backup, instant file level recovery with Universal Explorer, building Virtual Labs from Storage Repositories and Cross Hypervisor Migration (V2V). Sounds like a whole lot of great stuff for a backup application to have, well wait until you see their pricing which they post right on their website.
Most everything is licensed per host CPU socket, VMBackup for VMware is only $360 per CPU socket/annum. If you want to use their OffsiteDR for VMware to your own data center it’s only $90 per CPU socket/annum or CloudDR for VMware to the Vembu Cloud is only $0.20 per GB/month. In addition to data protection they also offer BDR360 for VMware which provides centralized monitoring & management for only $60 per CPU socket/annum.
So if you’re in the market for an affordable data protection solution I’d highly recommend you give Vembu a serious look. To help you out I’ve included a few links below to get you started:
