esXpress Review - Virtually Insane?

esXpress Review - Virtually Insane?

Product Review esXpress 
August 2009  Daniel Eason 
http://vmlover.blogspot.com/


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Company Background

PHD Technologies was formed in 2002 and they are based out of Mount Arlington New Jersey, USA. They have well over  1600 customers and this customer base includes big enterprises such as Siemens, Barnes and Noble, Tyco and are  extremely popular and big in the SMB Space and the Academia Space.

Technology Background

PHD provides organizations with a cost effective and robust solid backup tool; esXpress is now in its 3rd generation and  has been designed to combat the problem of backup in Virtualized estates since the ESX 2.x days. Now in the 3rd Genera-  tion release esXpress provides core functionality and technological advances that give PHD leading edge against other  players in the space and allows them to compete for Enterprise custom due to the extensive technical offerings. 

PHD utilize VBA (Virtual Backup Appliances) to perform backup restore from either a connected RDM Disk to your Virtual  ESX Hosts, NFS Share or even backup to a VMDK file. VBA’s are something PHD has architecturally used within its product  set since 2006, the enable backups to be performed with the following benefits for your Virtualized estates:

  • Negates the Need for VCB agents/proxies so esXpress can be used to remove the need for agent level backup on VM’s hosted on the entry level ESX license versions.
  • Removes the need for backup agents within VM’s or using VCB meaning you can virtualize more due to reduction in Host overhead.
  • In current environments using VCB it reduces the need for a VCB proxy server thus reducing cost of this server and any SAN requirements.
  • Each backup VBA can perform 16 concurrent jobs, competitors max at 8 (more detail on enhancements later).
  • VBAs are completely fault tolerant in that they are VMotionable to another Host in the possible event of a disaster striking VBA’s can be installed extremely quickly with the OVF import functionality.


vSphere 4 Support
Version 3.6 provides full support for this and also has a VC Plugin which is supported on the vCenter client. Additional admin is performed either via Web interface which provides you with the ability to manage the backup environment from any  desktop and not have to worry about having to install GUI’s wherever you go or want to check and manage backups.

Data De-duplication
Massive reductions in backup space requirements cam be achieved by using this feature. With VM’s being backed up with VCB using conventional backup products like Backup Exec or even Netbackup performing inline dedupe operations is not capable  natively by the underlying Backup software, you need an appliance or piece of additional software to do that at additional cost. esXpress 3.6 provides data de-duplication inline completely free of charge within your license entitlement. Dedupe in esXpress is claimed to provide up to a dedupe ratio of 25:1. 

The real magic in esXpress happens on what PHD call their De-dupe appliance, this de-dupe appliance is built using the PHD San appliance which is available to download additionally at: http://www.phdvirtual.com/products/virtualization-utilities  

This appliance can provide you with the option of using shared VMFS across local DAS storage on your ESX hosts without buying a full backend SAN. When using the De-dupe appliance and backup method incremental VM restoration is also  possible for de-duplicated backup.

esXpress De-duplication technology also means you can backup and restore any delta changes across your VM’s, This is  extremely beneficial for remote located VM’s, the delta block change capability means that you can exploit use of the WAN to backup across sites to reap the benefits of a complete centralized backup strategy, using a centralized backup strategy provides you with benefits such as reduced manpower overheads to change backup media and monitor jobs remotely, improved security of having data stored offsite, reduction in possible tape vaulting costs and many other benefits to your  organization when removing remote infrastructure.

Improved restores and backup streaming
In my opinion restores are the most important aspect to consider for any backup technology, it is no good backing up quickly if the restore activity is long and increases your RTO time. File level restores in VCB Virtual backup software is never quick, mainly due to having to mount the VMDK and then extract the file for a 15-20GB file this can take considerable time.  esXpress 3.6 has improved multi-user point and click restore functionality from within the esXpress java GUI, the extraction is made possible b unique executable file format and not a TAR or similar file.

Total backups per host is always a limiting factor in virtual backup architectures, VMware VCB has a recommendation  (setup dependant) of 4-6 concurrent jobs per ESX Host, esXpress 3.6 now can allow backup of a total of 16 concurrent jobs  per ESX host, meaning shorter backup windows.


Product Summary
esXpress is a great backup tool and touts some great niche technical features, this is most certainly a good product to use in the SMB space due to the lack of requirement to use VCB and can be used within the larger virtualized estates. Check out esXpress at its website: http://www.phdvirtual.com and a full 30 day demo available on http://phdvirtual.com/products/esxpress-virtual-backup.

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