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Most organizations worldwide are looking to migrate to cloud and cloud SaaS solutions if they have not already begun that journey. As a result, if you have paid attention to the past few NAKIVO Backup & Replication releases, NAKIVO has been adding many additional cloud features. These provide businesses with the tools to protect their business-critical data in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.
Note the following additional features added over the past few releases, among others:
- v10.7—Microsoft Teams support, Microsoft Azure Blob support, Backblaze B2 support, and Native Microsoft 365 change tracking support
- v10.6—Microsoft 365 group support, hardened Amazon Machine Image
- v10.5—Microsoft 365 (auto set permissions)
- v10.3—Backup and Recovery of Exchange Online contacts and calendars, VMware Cloud Director support
- v10.2—Backup and Recovery of SharePoint Online, Lock Backup Objects in Amazon S3
- v10.1—Backup and Recovery of Microsoft 365 OneDrive for Business
Unquestionably, like many data protection solution vendors, NAKIVO is aggressively targeting cloud data protection use cases. It is great to see it aligning capabilities with customers' needs.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8 new features
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8 is a major release with many new features to note. These include the following:
- MSP Console
- Full VMware vSphere 8 support
- S3-compatible storage support
- Persistent agent
- Job priority configuration
- Merge Jobs capability
- Improved retention workflow
MSP Console
In addition to its many cloud capabilities, NAKIVO has added many MSP features to its core functionality. For example, in NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8, NAKIVO has added a multi-tenant mode with an MSP Console, allowing MSPs to manage multiple tenants effectively.
It is also an effective solution in large enterprises with many departments that you want to treat as separate entities with separate data protection management. It enables IT admins and MSPs to use a single platform to protect data across a single organization or multiple organizations managed as separate tenants.
Below is the Add MSP screen to connect a new NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8 instance to an MSP.
Adding an MSP connection in NAKIVO Backup and Replication v10.8
VMware vSphere 8 support
The new NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8 release is fully supported to work with VMware vSphere 8, VMware's latest flagship release of vSphere. Historically, data protection support has been a blocker with upgrading to the latest hypervisor releases. Customers have to wait until their backup vendor supports the newest platform.
The latest NAKIVO release is fully supported by vSphere 8. NAKIVO has had support for vSphere 8 since the 10.7.2 patch release. However, seeing the new release providing full vSphere 8 support and other new features is excellent.
You can add a direct connection to an ESXi 8.0 host or a vCenter Server 8 appliance.
Adding a connection to VMware vSphere 8 in NAKIVO Backup and Replication v10.8
Amazon S3 compatible storage support
In NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8, you can create S3-compatible storage targets, allowing you to store your backup data in S3-compatible cloud storage easily. In addition, it enables businesses using the new NAKIVO v10.8 release to easily integrate S3-compatible storage solutions into the public or private cloud.
This new feature provides many benefits, including flexible recovery, ransomware protection, optimized performance, and multi-vendor support.
Adding S3 compatible cloud storage to NAKIVO Backup and Replication v10.8
Persistent agent
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8 includes a newly redesigned way to perform file-level recovery (FLR) using a persistent agent. Using the new persistent agent, you no longer have to input credentials when backing up VMs. You can now install the persistent agent for guest processing. Credentials are better protected using this new approach.
Managing VM agents in NAKIVO Backup and Replication v10.8
Job priority configuration
In the new release, there is an interesting new capability that enables admins to prioritize specific data protection jobs. The new job priority setting allows you to set which jobs in the environment should be prioritized over other running jobs.
When you set a job with a higher priority, backup resources are allocated for these higher-priority jobs over other jobs in the environment. For example, when multiple jobs are added to the queue, the jobs with higher priority are executed first. You can set priority levels between levels 1 and 5, with priority 1 being the highest.
Configuring the job priority level of a new backup job
Merge jobs capability
When your environment grows with multiple virtual machines, sites, and virtualization environments, your backup solution will grow with multiple backup, replication, and backup copy jobs. NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8 has added the capability to merge jobs with the new version.
Merging jobs allows backup admins to merge multiple jobs into a single job. For example, you may have three jobs for a single virtual machine: backup, replication, and backup copy jobs. You can merge those three jobs into one with the new merge functionality. One caveat: the jobs need to be of the same technology. So, you can only merge VMware jobs with other VMware jobs, etc.
Merging jobs in the new NAKIVO Backup and Replication v10.8 release
Improved retention workflow
One of the things you will notice across the board with NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8 is improved workflows in the UI. One of those is the Retention setting has been moved to the Schedules screen instead of remaining a standalone configuration when you go through the job wizards.
This change helps simplify the approach to managing data retention for your data protection jobs. In addition, it allows for a more fine-tuned approach, configuring retention for each schedule.
NAKIVO Backup Replication includes a new retention workflow
Wrapping up
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8 release is an excellent new release featuring new improvements in capabilities across the board. NAKIVO is doing a great job meeting the needs of organizations today with the new cloud and MSP features. Leveraging S3-compatible storage solutions provides flexibility in storing backups of critical workloads and data using robust cloud features. In addition, it enables immutability, among other features, and helps protect against ransomware. Overall, this excellent new release is "upgrade-worthy" for existing NAKIVO customers.
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You can download a trial version of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v10.8.
