NAKIVO Inc. is a fast-growing virtualization and cloud backup company, that offers the best data protection solutions for VMware, Hyper-V,  Nutanix AHV, and cloud environments such as Amazon EC2 backup and instance replication. They are constantly working hard on releasing new versions by adding new features to fulfill customer’s requirements and staying up-to-date. In May 2019, they have released Nakivo B&R v8.5.2 with vSphere 6.7U2 support.

I have previously published an article about Nakivo Backup and Replication v9.0 Beta release and now, I’m writing about the General Availability of Nakivo Backup & Recovery v9.0 with Windows Server Backup capabilities and many new added features. Nakivo is one of the top backup solutions and their developers are continuously working on the improvement of their flagship product.

New Features

Nakivo B&R v9.0 introduced the following new features, including:

Physical Windows Server Backup

With Nakivo B&R v9.0, you can protect your physical servers including all features you would want your backup solution should have such as consistently backing up running applications of Windows servers such as Microsoft SQL, SQL, Exchange. SharePoint, and Active Directory etc.

You can check Supported Platforms to know hardware and software requirements for this feature.

Application-Aware Backups

Nakivo B&R v9.0 offers consistent application-aware backups interacting with Volume Shadow Copy Service by Microsoft. Application data is flushed properly by VSS in Windows operating systems with each backup job when it runs, and it ensures that there will not be missed any data in memory and pending I/O transactions which could lead to a restore point. All windows applications such as Active Directory, SQL, Exchange, SharePoint etc. are being backed-up using this approach.

Global Data Deduplication

With Nakivo B&R v9.0, backups of VMs, AWS EC2 instances, and physical machines can be stored in a regular backup repository, and all backups can be automatically deduplicated to save unique data blocks regardless of the underlying platform. This approach helps in reducing the storage space used by physical machine backups.

Instant Granular Recovery

Files, folders, and objects of Microsoft applications such as Exchange, Active Directory, and SQL can be instantly recovered with the new NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.0 directly from deduplicated physical machine backups. In addition, the Universal Application Object Recovery feature can also be used to recover objects from any other applications.

 Physical to Virtual (P2V) Backup

With Nakivo Backup & Replication v9.0, the physical machine backups can be converted into virtual backups and be stored to VMware and Hyper-V VMs.

Per-machine Licensing

A new cool per-machine licensing option is available now, starting just at $17 per machine/year, with a simple, unique, and cost-effective subscription. A single per-machine license will cover either a physical machine, VMware VM, Hyper-V VM, Nutanix AHV VM, or an AWS EC2 instance. It provides customers the opportunity to remove vendor locks and move their workloads freely between platforms without having to change their data protection licensing.

Hyper-V 2019 Support

Nakivo B&R v9.0 offers a cool feature of supporting Hypver-V 2019 with full compatibility with Hyper-V 2019.

HYDRAstor – NAKIVO Data Protection Solution

Nakivo combined efforts with NEC HYDRAstor to produce enterprise-level data protection solution for Hyper-V, VMware, Nutanix AHV, AWS EC2, and for Windows Server. With NEC HYDRAstor deduplication technology, NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows you to protect your data and decrease the size of your backups by up to 95% while ensuring complete data protection for your environment and significantly cut down data protection costs.

Free NFR Licenses for Virtualization Pros

To learn and hands-on Nakivo’s flagship product, they offer free NFR license to virtualization professionals. If you are a VMware vExpert, VCP, VSP, VTSP, or VCI, you can receive a FREE two-socket Not-For-Resale (NFR) license of NAKIVO Backup & Replication for one year. You can use this license in your home or work lab.

The NFR licenses are available for non-production use only, including educational, lab testing, evaluation, training, and demonstration purposes. This offer ends on September 30, 2019.

Resources

Author: Nisar Ahmad

Systems Engineer, vExpert 2017-19, owner of My Virtual Journey, with experience in managing a Datacenter environment using VMware and Microsoft Technologies. This blog mainly covers virtualization and cloud technologies but also covers some other technologies such as Cyber Security, Quantum Computing etc.