Barracuda Intros Cloud LiveBoot For VMware For Speedy Disaster Recovery

Barracuda Networks on Tuesday unveiled a new disaster recovery capability for its cloud storage offering that allows users to boot a live VMware-based virtual machine from the cloud.

Barracuda on Tuesday released Barracuda Backup version 5.2 featuring Cloud LiveBoot for VMware, a new technology that lets customers that have replicated data to the cloud to boot VMware images using deduplicated data, said Andy Jensen, director of product management for Barracuda storage.

"It's a pretty unique capability," Jensen said. "There are certainly options out there to recover data in the cloud. And there are options that include warm site recovery. But they're expensive. We're talking about what customers are doing now--replicating to the cloud--and adding to it at a relatively low cost."

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Being able to boot from cloud-based virtual machines has been a sorely missed feature, said Alain Bezahler, president of BCPi, a Sharon, Mass.-based networking and security solution provider and Barracuda partner.

"I'm glad to see them offering it," Bezahler said. "This has become a requested service with enterprise solutions."

LiveBoot for VMware customers that back up deduplicated and compressed data to a Barracuda Backup Server and from there to the cloud can also back up their VMware ESXi virtual servers with VMware's vSphere APIs for Data Protection (VADP), Jensen said.

"Customers can now log in to our hosted user interface, go to the restore browser, and get one or more virtual machines up and running in our Barracuda cloud," he said.

Customers can run between one and five virtual machines simultaneously in the cloud, depending on the model of Barracuda Backup Server they have, at no extra charge as long as they have a Barracuda cloud storage subscription and have purchased the company's Instant Replacement enhanced warranty program, Jensen said.

While Barracuda Backup version 5.3 will include support for Hyper-V 2012 and Clustered Share Volume for Hyper-V 2008 environments when it is released sometime later this year, it will still be some time before the company is able to support the LiveBoot capability in Hyper-V environments.

Bezahler said he is not concerned that Barracuda LiveBoot has not yet been released for Microsoft Hyper-V.

"Our Microsoft Hyper-V business is definitely growing, but customers who want performance and features are still paying for VMware," he said. "I'd like to see Barracuda extend LiveBoot across other hypervisors. But, it's no big deal."

PUBLISHED JUNE 18, 2013