NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.1 GA Released Download New Features
Quick Summary
- When looking at creating and aligning your disaster recovery solution with the 3-2-1 backup best practice methodology, tape provides a great way to satisfy offsite storage, and storing your backups on at least two different forms of storage media.
- This includes the ability to restore individual files and folders, application data, and the ability to perform P2V operations from the physical Linux server to a VMware vSphere or Hyper-V….
- That is a lot of new features in a single year, and they continue to integrate new features and enhancements with each release.
Not too long ago, we covered the release of NAKIVO Backup & Replication 9.1 Beta, touting great new features to extend the functionality and capabilities covering virtual, physical, and cloud environments. NAKIVO brings forward new releases on a very aggressive schedule of betas and then GA releases. It has only been a couple of months ago that the beta release of NAKIVO 9.1 was announced and released for download. The GA release of NAKIVO 9.1 appears to be NAKIVO’s first major release of 2020. Let’s take a look at NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.1 GA Released Download New Features to look at its new features and capabilities.
Overview of NAKIVO
NAKIVO has a very impressive product that contains many great features. They are extremely aggressive with releasing new features in their Backup & Replication solution.
Their efforts have certainly paid off with many major feature and capability enhancements in this past year. These include Nutanix AHV Support, VM replication from backup, auto updating, FreeNAS support, latest vSphere compatibility, Hyper-V 2019 support, and Windows physical server backups.
That is a lot of new features in a single year, and they continue to integrate new features and enhancements with each release. This speaks to their commitment to listen to their customers.
Most of the new features are driven by capabilities their customers want and need included in the product. The results of their efforts shows in the list of current customers including Coca Cola, Honda, DHL Fujifilm, and China Airlines just to name a few.
NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.1 GA Released New Features
NAKIVO has really been concentrating on rounding out their support for and feature set in backing up physical servers and workstations. This release helps to bolster their offering in this regard by two great new physical workload backup features. In addition, new tape functionality is included along with backup verification improvements.
- Native Backup to Tape
- Physical Linux Server Backup
- Physical Workstation Backup
- Instant Verification
Let’s take a look at each new feature a bit more closely.
1. Native Backup to Tape
NAKIVO has introduced Native Backup to Tape functionality with the release of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.1. Tape storage is still very alive and well in the enterprise datacenter. It still proves to be one of the most cost effective means of long term archival storage media around.
It is a tried and proven storage technology that most businesses are very comfortable with at this point. When looking at creating and aligning your disaster recovery solution with the 3-2-1 backup best practice methodology, tape provides a great way to satisfy offsite storage, and storing your backups on at least two different forms of storage media.
With the release of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.1, NAKIVO is including a fully featured tape management system right inside Backup & Replication. So, not only will you be able to use NAKIVO for native tape backups, you can use the solution for tape device management, tape cartridge management, and tape backup management.
NAKIVO native tape support includes compatibility with LTO 3 and later tape libraries, standalone tape drives, and AWS VTL
2. Physical Linux Server Backup
NAKIVO recently introduced the ability to backup physical Windows Servers with NBR. It was only a matter of time before support for physical Linux servers would be introduced.
The wait is over for this feature. With the release of NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.1. GA, NAKIVO has officially introduced this feature. Now businesses can protect physical Linux servers in their organizations easily. NAKIVO already supports VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV), physical (Windows Server) and cloud (AWS EC2) servers. So, this new Linux-based server support broadens supported platforms even further.
NAKIVO uses their own proprietary change tracking mechanism as a filter driver to capture changes between each backup iteration. This allows very efficient incremental copies between each backup.
In addition to the efficient backup mechanism for Linux servers, NAKIVO allows many powerful restore options for physical Linux servers. This includes the ability to restore individual files and folders, application data, and the ability to perform P2V operations from the physical Linux server to a VMware vSphere or Hyper-V VM.
3. Physical Workstation Backup
Also new to this release, NAKIVO has extended the ability to backup physical Windows workstations. This means that Microsoft’s client operating systems like Windows 10 will be supported for backup.
The same backup and restore capabilities are extended to the physical workstation backup and restore functionality found in the product. This includes granular file restores and P2V to VMware vSphere and Hyper-V VMs.
4. Instant Verification
One of the most overlooked components of any backup solution or disaster recovery plan is making sure you have tested or verified your backups. Why is this important?
Unverified backups may contain errors, or be altogether unusable. This means your worst nightmare can come true. You are in the middle of a data disaster and your backups are no good.
Testing or verifying your backups is the only way to ensure your backup data is usable in the even of a disaster affecting your organization. Manual backup testing is extremely tedious and is often the reason the testing of backups is not carried out.
However, having an automated means of verifying your backups makes this process much easier. NAKIVO has long had backup verification as part of Backup & Replication. However, with this release, a new version called instant verification has been introduced.
With instant verification you can instantly recover a VM from its backup or boot a VM replica with networking turned off and then check the OS heartbeat via VMware Tools or Hyper-V Integration Services. After the VM is verified, NAKIVO can send a screenshot to show the VM has been verified and is a good copy of production data.
Why Choose NAKIVO?
The backup space in the realm of virtualization, cloud, physical backups, and others is a crowded spaced filled with many different companies and solutions. A product certainly has to stand out as different and offer compelling features to differentiate itself in this space.
There are many reasons why I think a company would choose NAKIVO. These include the following:
- Features
- Simplicity
- Cost
Features
We have already touched on features, however, just to point this out a bit further, you want to choose a data protection solution that protects your assets of today, but is also committed to developing and integrating those capabilities into their product that will support the technologies of tomorrow.
NAKIVO shows great commitment to this as is shown by new features offered with each release of NBR. No doubt, if you are like me, you like to see a company aggressively developing a solution as this helps to instill confidence in the platform and proves the commitment over the life cycle of the product.
Simplicity
The product is simple to use, intuitive, and easy to get up and running. We have all used those products where the solution works, but workflows are confusing, overly complicated, or just downright difficult. The process to get up and running with NAKIVO is simple from deploying an appliance to creating your first backup job.
Cost
NAKIVO offers great pricing in either a perpetual pricing model or subscription based. You can choose which level of pricing based on the features you need. Check out their pricing calculator for more information on pricing for your specific needs.
Wrapping Up
NAKIVO has introduced another great release with NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.1 GA Released Download New Features. The new features and enhancements are going further provide customers with the features they need to solve the often very complex data protection challenges that exist in the enterprise.
NAKIVO provides a great solution that allows protecting virtual, physical, or cloud resources effectively. The new physical backup features as well as native tape support and instant verification are powerful new additions to this release. Be sure to download a trial version of NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.1 GA to test in your environment. To download, click here.
