Paragon Software Group releases Protect & Restore 3.5

Paragon Software Group announces the release of Paragon Protect & Restore 3.5 – an advanced backup and disaster recovery solution with centralized IT management for organizations employing diverse platforms and technologies in physical and virtual environments. The new PPR 3.5 delivers rock-solid security in heterogeneous IT environments consisting of domain and non-domain machines.

PPR 3.5 comes with significantly increased backup and recovery performance by at least 50%. In addition, the new PPR 3.5 is now able to work with complex infrastructures utilizing up to 20,000 objects per OU (Organizational Unit).

The new release brings the most efficient utilization of backup storage and network traffic, delivering a very powerful deduplication mechanism, specially developed for today’s diverse corporate IT environments challenged with managing heterogeneous systems. PPR 3.5 delivers enhanced Exchange database backup and recovery, protection of virtual machines hosted by Microsoft Hyper-V, and other advancements.

In case of a disaster, PPR enables IT administrators to instantly restore any physical or virtual machine, minimizing the downtime and the entire recovery process to seconds. PPR employs the VMware replication mechanism, strengthened and broadened by Paragon Software’s own proprietary patent-pending data processing techniques that enable it to benefit from very fast recovery timings of VM replication during the restore of physical machines, making it a unique feature on the market.
“Data is the most important asset of any organization. In case of a disaster, IT administrators should be able to get systems back online within the minimal downtime. PPR tackles data loss threats posed to companies by providing advanced, easy-to-use protection, incorporating the latest imaging, replication and restore technologies,” commented Konstantin Komarov, CEO of Paragon Software Group.

IT administrators can benefit from PPR’s ease of use via a centralized management console, very low impact on the performance of systems during backup, and distributed architecture providing real flexibility. Attractive licensing models, based on the number of systems and variety of platforms to be protected, are especially optimized to meet up to date IT-compliance and financial controlling guidelines. Paragon offers a competitive (up to 50%) discount to companies replacing multiple data protection solutions for various platforms and environments with PPR, designed to work seamlessly with all.

New features and benefits:
· Backup Data Deduplication
Paragon’s deduplication mechanism significantly reduces backup storage footprint and network traffic. PPR works the same way for both – virtual and physical backup images, thus enabling a better deduplication efficiency. Moreover, Paragon’s deduplication works globally, meaning that all backup data sent to the deduplication server is deduplicated, while other solutions on the market only offer a block-level deduplication for images created by one backup job.
PPR offers an intelligent continuous validation technique to guarantee all unique data blocks used by multiple restore points and backup storages are consistent. An additional level of protection can be achieved by using multiple deduplication servers in a mirrored configuration.
· Enhanced Exchange Database Backup and Recovery
PPR offers agent-based protection of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010/2013 and its email databases. By operating at the application level through MS VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) API, the administrator does not need to allocate time for backup windows, for PPR enables consistent database backups without any impact on the production email server.
PPR supports all the latest MS Exchange backup technologies, like incremental imaging, data retention, block-level data deduplication, and others. The product’s main advantage is in the flexible restore of all or specific databases to the original or new location, including restore to RSG (Recovery Storage Group) or Recovery Database with the option to create a dial tone database to let users send or receive emails in the process. PPR also allows non-destructive restore of certain mailboxes.
· Enhanced Virtual Machine Backup and Replication
PPR enables the administrator to set the best backup method for any vSphere guest machine to protect it with minimal overheads.
Comprehensive backup validation facilities allow the organizing of field tests for an existing recovery plan by simulating recovery procedures in an isolated network environment. In case of emergency, the administrator can get a failed virtual machine back on track in seconds by failing over to one of its replicas.
In PPR, backup techniques for physical and virtual machines are closely integrated, including dual backup scenarios, which has opened a way for the instant launch of physical backup images directly in a vSphere environment for recovery or test purposes.
· Highest Performance and Exceptional Robustness
PPR feels completely at home in a huge infrastructure comprising thousands of protected machines. It has been tested and proved completely viable in browsing up to 20000 Active Directory objects per one OU (Organizational Unit).
PPR includes a powerful logging mechanism, which enables it to keep track of any action accomplished either by the administrator or the infrastructure itself. To avoid overgrowth of the log database, it can be truncated by setting the maximum object lifetime until archived or deleted.
WinPE bootable media prepared through RMB 3.0 (Recovery Media Builder) can boast more functions and usability, e.g. granular restore for Hyper-V guests, easy network reconfiguration of infrastructure members, better support of target machines with several NICs aboard, etc.
· Native PPR Security
Especially for diverse environments that consist of Windows domain and workgroup machines as well as Linux workgroup machines where the Domain Controller security facilities cannot be employed, PPR includes a special security mode called Native PPR Security. Implementing the ‘one connection – one session approach’, Paragon Software has minimized the chances of unauthorized access, as each connection to the PPR infrastructure uses a special session with a unique ID, as protection against remote connection via any third-party application.
· Rotating Media Support
PPR introduces a new type of backup destination called the disk pool. Its main benefit lies in the fact that drives can be removed or added to a pool at any time without having to reconfigure the backup policies that use it. This minimizes the risk of downtime or data loss in cases when the allocated storage has failed or run out of space, and it perfectly fits with today’s compliance regulations mandating the use of new backup storage media each day.