Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 with great improvements

Vembu is a well-established backup company. Vembu BDR Suite v5 is their product that evolved into a feature-rich backup solution that can rival the best enterprise backup products. Over the previous versions, Vembu has been adding features and improving the user interface so that it is easy to navigate and easy to use. One of the main missions for Vembu is that their product delivers real value, in terms of features, user experience, and pricing.

The Covid pandemic affected the world with new habits and changed the way we work. Many companies and institutions changed the way they work and shifted to work from home. Vembu has ensured that the latest release can protect Office 365 and even Google Workspace.

Vembu BDR Suite v5 new features

• Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online backup – Vembu has added support for Microsoft 365 backup and recovery of the entire sites, web collections, individual files, folders, and entire document libraries of SharePoint Online.

• Microsoft 365 Teams Backup – Vembu Backup for Microsoft 365 supports the backup and recovery of the conversations, chats, planners, tasks, etc. of the Microsoft 365 Teams.

• Backup for Google Workspace – Many organizations use Google Workspaces so Backup vendors must cover Google services as well. The latest version of BDR Suite now includes Backup for Google Workspace with support for backup of Mails, Google Drive, Contacts, and Calendar.

• Backup for AWS – BDR Suite with the latest release supports agentless and application-consistent backup of AWS EC2 instances.

What about New Features and Enhancements

• Hyper-V VM Replication – Are you prepared for the worst? When a disaster strikes or you experience a system crash a regular backup is not offering the protection you need. With the latest feature, you can simply failover your production workloads to the replica VMs and continue your company operations.

• Instant Boot Live Migration – I think that one of the best features that Hypervisor backup enabled is Instant Boot. Let’s say that you have a problem with the server. Instant boot enables you to boot your server directly from your backup repository. That way your users won’t experience downtime. But you had to wait until the end of their work hours to restore a server. Now With Instant Boot Live Migration, you can restore the server while it is in use. How awesome is that?

• Parallel VM Processing – Vembu now supports parallel backup of multiple VMs/disks in a single host. You can customize the number of backup jobs and the number of VMs/disks in a single backup job that can run in parallel from the BDR Backup Server GUI.
  Rotated Drives as Backup Repository – A new feature that has been added to the latest version is setting up rotating drives as the primary backup repository. That way you can use multiple external drives to store backup data and swap them regularly. Similar to tape backup only with HDDs.

• Optimized Backup with Where-it-left-off – BDR Suite 5.0 supports the Where-it-left-of feature. This feature may not seem much but is very important for times when the backup can not proceed. For example, if a network failure occurs on a WAN link, you would have to start again but with the Where-it-left feature, the backup will continue from the point of failure. This also applies to other interruptions. That way you can save a lot of time which is very important if you have a lot of data.

• Synthetic Full Backup – Synthetic full backups are created in the backup repository by merging the full backup and all subsequent incremental backups in the backup repository itself, instead of running an additional full backup. It reduces the time and bandwidth usage over the network for creating multiple full backups in the backup repository.

• GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) Retention – BDR Suite now supports GFS retention. GFS retention enables you to create restore points on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. GFS restore points are tied to an additional Full backup or a Synthetic Full Backup. GFS is a great way to follow backup best practices.

• Backup Job Template – For all frequently used backup configuration settings you can now create backup templates as per predefined backup policies. When you utilize backup templates you can create backup jobs faster.

• Multi-host Backup Support – To improve performance, you can configure running backup for different hosts/VMs inside a job to run in parallel which will improve backup performance.

• Application Item-level Recovery from web GUI – BDR Suite 5.0 supports item-level recovery for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and AD from BDR Backup Server web GUI. Any restore point can be selected and individual items can be recovered within minutes.

Conclusion

Vembu has released a great update. Many features are really useful and I also like the Where-It-left-Off feature – when our internet provider was having network problems this feature would save me a lot of time and also ensure that backups are completed in the backup window you expect to finish. A reliable backup is very important, especially now. If you are interested in Vembu backup, please give them a try. They have a great product and they provide a 30-day free trial.