PHD Virtual Expands Engineering Team, Doubles R&D Capacity as Company Scales to Meet Customer Growth

PHD Virtual Adds Vladimir Hrabrov as Vice President of Engineering and Alex Mittell as Director-Senior Virtualization Architect

SAN FRANCISCO – September 2, 2009 — During VMworld 2009, PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the pioneering esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, today announced that it has expanded its engineering team to meet aggressive product enhancement schedules for esXpress, the award-winning, fault-tolerant backup and restore solution which enables the virtual infrastructure to back itself up. To help lead this expanding team, which has doubled in overall R&D capacity in the past month, Vladimir Hrabrov has joined the company as vice president of engineering and Alex Mittell has been named director-senior virtualization architect.

"Under the vision of Vlad and Alex, the PHD Virtual engineering team will work to extend the reach of our award winning technology into new hypervisors, platforms and operating systems," said Joe Julian, executive chairman, PHD Virtual. "Vlad has a tremendous track record for effective team management and efficient product delivery and we are very pleased to have him join our executive team as we ramp for the next phase in our rapid growth."

Hrabrov joins PHD Virtual from Hewlett-Packard and has over 30 years of experience designing and developing enterprise-scale configuration management systems in entrepreneurial environments as well as established organizations. As a Certified Scrum Practitioner, he brings valuable experience in building strong, agile engineering teams, as well as a proven, disciplined approach to release, risk, and product quality management. At HP, Hrabrov was an R&D and program manager in charge of OS deployment for HP Client Automation. He joined HP as a part of the Novadigm acquisition where he was a senior architect and project manager. Before his work at Novadigm, Hrabrov worked at Legent Corp, Spectrum Concepts and the Ukrainian Ministry of Standards, where he held key management and development roles. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from National Technical University of Ukraine "Kyiv Polytechnic Institute."

Mittell joined PHD Virtual in 2008 and is a widely known technical expert and thought leader in the virtualization community. He is a co-founder of Xtravirt, the UK provider of virtualization solutions throughout the technology lifecycle. While at Xtravirt, Alex authored many of the free virtualization tools that are available on the PHD Virtual web site. Prior to co-founding Xtravirt, he worked at Oxford University in the UK as a virtual architect, where he designed and configured the university’s virtual infrastructure.

"I am excited to be joining a company that has been an innovator in such cutting-edge technology," said Hrabrov. "I am also very pleased with the new additions to our development team, which include experts in the fields of configuration management, Internet infrastructure, OS design and architecture, user interface design, quality assurance, and publications. The esXpress Virtual Backup Appliance architecture is a superior approach to virtual machine data protection and I am confident in our success as we work to extend esXpress into new hypervisors, and grow its heterogeneous operating system awareness."

"I am pleased to be expanding my role at PHD Virtual and increasing my ability to influence the direction of our core virtual appliance architecture, which I feel yields many benefits versus the more traditional methods of backing up data in a virtual environment," said Mittell.

PHD Virtual will be demonstrating esXpress during VMworld 2009 in booth number 1502. You may also learn about esXpress by visiting PHD Virtual’s virtual VMworld booth: http://www.vmworld.com/community/exhibitors/phdvirtual or, download a free trial version of esXpress by visiting: http://www.phdvirtual.com/download?task=view.download&cid=11

About PHD Virtual Technologies

The fastest multi-VM backup on the market and pioneer of Virtual Backup Appliances (VBAs), PHD Virtual Technologies has been transforming data protection for VMware since 2006. Its award-winning data protection solution, esXpress, is used today by more than 2,000 enterprises worldwide to achieve scalable, high availability and cost effective backup and restore solutions for VMware. esXpress was awarded Best of VMworld Finalist for 2009. In 2008, esXpress was named "Data Protection Product of the Year" by SearchServerVirtualization.com. PHD Virtual also provides a suite of free, virtualization utilities to assist with the administration and management of virtualized environments. PHD Virtual supports global resellers through its Channel Xpress partner program and is a proud VMware Technology Alliance Partner.