Storage Startup Altaro Readies Hyper-V Backup Option

New storage provider Altaro is making waves in the world of online backup.

Firstly it is located on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. It has made its name by specialising in backing up data for home PCs, business PCs and file servers.

Now, the company is preparing a new product specifically for backing up Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines, something that can be complicated to do efficiently in a data centre.

Virtual Backup

The 2-year-old company, whose Hyper-V product is in beta with a growing number of corporate customers testing it, will be releasing Beta 4 of its Hyper-V Cluster CSV on 25 July. The general availability version is expected to be released in the new few weeks.

“Hyper-V Backup does all the connection configurement for you, and we’ve fixed it so you can back up any VM instance with five clicks or less,” founder and CEO David Vella told eWEEK. “It’s really the easiest backup of its kind anywhere.”

Hyper-V Backup, which installs on a Hyper-V server, also allows users to pick and choose which VMs they want to back up, which makes for much more efficient storage capacity and planning. Because it also is agentless, users don’t have to fret about installing anything on each virtual machine – the software finds each node within the system automatically.

The product also features hot-swappable backups, clone restores, file level restores, cluster backups, a scheduling engine, restores of different versions and other features.

Simple Solution

“We designed it to be simple enough for a non-IT person to use on a daily basis,” Vella said. “This was the whole idea behind it.”

Altaro’s regular corporate customers include Harvard University, Astaro, Mitsubishi and the Univesity of Delaware. It has several thousand consumer users around the world, Vella said.

Go here to sign up for a notification as to when the free download of the Hyper-V backup will become available.