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NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 provides new features, including backup to Amazon S3 storage, better physical-to-virtual recovery, role-based access control, and the ability to recover application objects to the source server. In this review, we take a look at the new features and functionality provided in this release.
Protecting your data is at the top of the priority list when it comes to IT operations. The backup solution that you choose is at the center of the capabilities you have at your disposal to protect your data. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a backup solution that has been aggressively adding new features with each release.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4, there are many new features that expand the capabilities of the NAKIVO backup solution to strengthen cloud, physical workstation, and security features.
In this review of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4, we will take a look at these new capabilities and see how they can improve the data protection features in your environment.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 new features
There are quite a few new features in this release of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4. These include the following:
- Backup to Amazon S3
- Backup of fault-tolerant VMware VMs
- Role-based access (RBAC)
- Instant object recovery to source for Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory
- Instant physical-to-virtual recovery
Let's look at the new features in more detail and see how they expand the capabilities for customers using NAKIVO Backup & Replication in their datacenter.
Backup to Amazon S3
Enterprise environments are increasingly leveraging cloud storage as part of their overall disaster recovery (DR) strategy. Cloud makes a lot of sense in terms of off-site and long-term archival storage. In fact, many organizations today allocate a large part of their cloud budget to disaster recovery/backups in cloud environments.
In the Amazon world, the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage solution that many are familiar with. It provides great features and capabilities for storing large amounts of data. It also has "11 9s" of uptime for durability and is arguably the most popular storage service of the big cloud vendors.
Another advantage to using cloud storage with disaster recovery is that your cloud storage can be accessed from anywhere at any time. This is an advantage over strictly on-premises storage, especially with regard to your backups. Most will consider it a priority to have access to their backups wherever they may be.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 allows targeting Amazon S3 and EBS volumes
With the release of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4, NAKIVO enables its customers to target Amazon S3 storage for storing both backups and backup copies of virtual machine workloads in the cloud.
This provides for many new capabilities from a NAKIVO standpoint, including the following:
- Direct backup: There is no intermediary holding storage or other mechanism to store your backups or backup copies. You can target Amazon S3 directly.
- Backup Copy: With NAKIVO's backup copy jobs, you can easily have another copy of your backup data stored offsite in another location. The backup copies can be exact copies of backups on disk or rolled up to a configurable number of restore points.
- Instant VM Boot: Instant VM boot allows booting VMs directly from your backup storage. In this case, your virtual machine can be booted from Amazon S3 so that it runs in the cloud, providing quick restore times. While you can perform a full VM restore from Amazon S3 storage, this provides the fastest means of recovery since you don't have to first restore the data to bring your virtual machine back online.
- Data compression: Since cloud costs are based on usage, you want to ensure that your backups are stored as efficiently as possible. Compression allows shrinking the overall backup storage footprint in the cloud.
- File recovery: With backups stored in the cloud, NAKIVO allows you to perform "file-level recovery" (FLR). This is an efficient way to get exactly what you need. If you need a single file, you don't have to restore the entire VM to get it. You can simply mount the restore point and pull the file needed from the backup.
- Object recovery: Like file-level recovery, object recovery allows you to perform recovery of specific objects from your application data backups of Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange Server.
Backup of Fault-tolerant VMware VMs
For VMware vSphere environments, many VMware customers may take advantage of virtual machines that have been set up in a fault tolerance configuration. VMware fault tolerance is used when you need to have virtual machine workloads in a continuous availability configuration.
With fault tolerance, virtual machines are configured in a primary/secondary fault tolerance pair. The primary virtual machine in the pair is the VM that is live in production. The secondary copy receives continuous updates so that you can have transparent failover in case something happens to the primary production virtual machine.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4, NAKIVO has introduced the ability to protect both the primary and secondary VMs in the fault-tolerant pair. You not only have the fault tolerance mechanism protecting your data, but you also have the added backup of both the primary and secondary fault tolerance VMs.
Role-based access (RBAC)
In environments both large and small, having role-based access (RBAC) configured across IT systems is crucial for both security and compliance. Your backup data generally falls in the scope of most regulatory compliance frameworks. When you think about it, your backup data is production data.
By implementing full RBAC into NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4, NAKIVO provides the tools needed to help implement proper separation of duties into backup operations and data protection in your environment. This helps to ensure that access rights and privileges can be limited appropriately, which helps to reduce the potential risks to your data in the environment and satisfy compliance best practices.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 users and roles
Instant object recovery for Active Directory and Exchange
There is a welcome change to NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 in terms of recovering your application data for Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange Server. Prior to this release, restoring NAKIVO application data required an interim step. There was no direct restore to the source application server.
With this release of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4, you can perform instant object recovery to the source application server without any additional steps, including restoring the full virtual machine to recover your data.
Instant recovery of application objects directly to the application server
Instant physical to virtual recovery
NAKIVO has strengthened its physical server backup offering over the past few releases with the introduction of both physical Windows and Linux server support. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4, you can now perform instant recovery of physical servers to virtual machines. What use cases does this support?
With instant physical-to-virtual recovery, you can now recover a physical server to a virtual machine from backups if need be. This also enables testing migrations or other processes that may see your physical servers need to be P2V'ed to virtual machines.
Wrapping up and impressions of NBR v9.4
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an extremely solid backup solution that continues to add really powerful new features with each release. I like their aggressive release cycle and that they are listening to what customers are saying they want/need in their environments.
The v9.4 release brings a lot of great new features that most environments can make use of today, including cloud connectivity and storage. The ability to target Amazon S3 and EBS volumes allows customers to expand their storage capabilities and make use of cheap cloud object storage for long-term archives or for bolstering 3-2-1 backup best practices by storing their backup copies in the cloud.
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The other new features, which allow better permissions management, physical-to-virtual recovery, and application data recovery methods, show that NAKIVO is certainly coming of age and providing a solid, fully featured product that satisfies the growing demands of today's businesses.
