Arkeia Software extends Network Backup support to VMware vSphere
Arkeia Software is a US vendor focused on disaster recovery. It's flagship product, Network Backup, is a backup/restore engine that features agents for multiple applications, databases, file servers and storage arrays in the physical world.
Arkeia also supports all the three major virtualization platforms: Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX.
The company just updated the product to introduce support for vSphere, by leveraging the vStorage API.
While Network Backup is only capable to perform a full backup for Hyper-V virtual machines (through the Volume Shadow Service), on vSphere it can also do a block-level incremental backup thanks to the VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology and Raw Device Mapping (RDM) support.
The product supports the vApp packaging and integrates with the vCenter Server GUI.
The restore process can be managed through a web management interface:
At the moment the product is not capable to perform a file level restore. Arkeia plans to introduce this feature during the Q3 2010.
The company even offer a free version of its product, available as a virtual appliance for ESX/ESXi deployments, but such edition is only able to protect two virtual machine, has a limited disk storage size of 250GB and most of all it doesn't support the new vStorage API.