Idealstor Looks To Ease VMware Backups

The solution, iBac Virtual Infrastructure Proxy (VIP), allows the backup of the virtual servers to be offloaded to a separate physical server to increase the backup performance significantly, said Nandan Arora, the vendor's CTO.

Those proxy servers can either be purchased from Idealstor or from other sources.

IBac VIP is a reworked version of the company's iBac backup application for Windows servers, with new functionality specific to backing up virtual servers.

VMware's ESX uses the VMware Consolidated Backup function, known as VCB, to back up virtual servers. However, VCB can impact backup performance because it uses the host server's processor to handle the backups as well, Arora said.

"With our product, the backups are offloaded to a proxy server, separate from the virtual machine host server, to increase performance," he said. "Otherwise, things slow to a crawl."

Todd Leidner, vice president of operations at Intelek Technologies, a solution provider that has been backing up virtual servers using iBac, said he looks forward to the new iBac VIP.

"I can't imagine how much easier, faster and more reliable it will be," Leidner said.

Intelek will use iBac VIP with Idealstor's proxy servers in some cases, and without in other cases, especially for small customers that still use USB hard drives to back up 15 GB to 20 GB of data each night.

Despite their size, such customers are ripe for server virtualization and for tools to make it easier to back up their virtual infrastructures, Leidner said.

"VMware is applicable to almost any customer," he said. "Even customers with only three servers can find it cheaper to buy one beefier server and VMware than three new servers."

The initial version of iBac VIP is available already for the VMware ESX environment, said Ben Ginster, channel marketing manager for Idealstor. It is available through Bell Microproducts, and has a list price of $1,695 per physical server regardless of how many virtual machines are on the server, Ginster said.

A version for Microsoft Hyper-V is expected during the first quarter of 2009. A version for Citrix XenServer is on the "back burner" for now, Ginster said.