Arkeia Software, a provider of backup and disaster recovery software and appliances, has launched Arkeia vStorage Virtual Appliance which packages the Arkeia vStorage Backup Agent as a virtual appliance.

The company said the appliance is compatible with any Arkeia Backup Server v8.2.10 or later, and can be deployed on any vSphere hypervisor, as well as used to backup other virtual machines on that hypervisor or other vSphere hypervisors.

The Arkeia vStorage Virtual Appliance bundles the Arkeia Backup Agent for vStorage to offer support for VMware vSphere 4 any combination of vCenter, ESX, and ESXi as well as VMware Infrastructure 3.

Arkeia’s vStorage Backup Agent permits backups to disk, to tape, and to disk and then to tape (D2D2T), and backup data sets can be replicated locally, and over a WAN.

Arkeia’s Web user interface includes block-grain incremental image-level backups using VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT); vCenter integration for simplified management of backup and recovery operations.

It also features vApp support to backup and restore groups of VMs working together, as well as granular restore on a per-VM basis; and multiple transport methods enabling the Arkeia Agent to perform LAN-free backups via SCSI hot-add or over the virtual LAN for accelerated performance.

It also includes Raw Device Mapping (RDM) support for backups of remote block storage devices, including incremental backups using CBT when in virtual compatibility mode.

Additionally, it has differential backups, as well as full and incremental backups, for the flexibility to define an efficient backup process; flexible restores including hypervisor redirection, as well as options to choose datacentre/folder, cluster/host, resource pool, or datastore destinations to simplify the restore process; and file-grain restores from image backups.

Arkeia Software VP of marketing Fred Renard said the Arkeia vStorage Virtual Appliance leverages the benefits of virtualisation for backup.

"Now, sites can deploy the Arkeia Backup Agent for vStorage in less than 5 minutes. Rather than prepare an operating environment before installing the Arkeia Backup Agent for vStorage, the two are bundled in an optimised virtual appliance that includes the VMware VDDK libraries," Fred said.