NAKIVO has once again completed a successful beta program and has moved the new features contained into a GA release of the product. Not too long ago we covered the NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 beta release and the new features that were contained therein. Now, the beta release of v9.4 is now GA and the new features that were listed are now available to the masses and for upgraded previous versions of the appliance. Let’s take a closer look at the NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 GA released new features to get a deeper dive into the enhancements with this newly released GA code.
What’s new with NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 GA?
You would think that in the midst of the pandemic, NAKIVO, like many other companies would have at least slowed down their aggressive release cycles. However, the release of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 GA shows that NAKIVO is still keeping pace.
This is also not a “light” release of simple bug fixes and stability enhancements. This is a major release with some really rocking new features that current and potential customers will certainly be glad to see.
New Features in the NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.4 GA release
There are many new features contained in the NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.4 GA release. These include the following:
- Backup to Amazon S3
- Instant P2V
- Role-based access control (RBAC)
- Backup of Fault-tolerant VMware VMs
- Instant Object Recovery to Source
Let’s take a look at the features mentioned and see how they are introduced in this new GA release.
Backup to Amazon S3
There is no question that Amazon’s cloud services and solutions are leading the market. Many organizations are in some way making use of Amazon EC2 or Amazon storage as part of their overall hybrid infrastructure. One of the major use cases for cloud storage is disaster recovery. When looking at disaster recovery strategies, best practices dictate that organizations utilize offsite storage as part of their overall DR strategy.
Cloud storage provides an easy and cost-effective approach to satisfying the requirement to have offsite storage as part of the overall 3-2-1 backup strategy. Amazon’s S3 storage provides simple and cost-effective object storage for storing either backup copies or for archival storage. Cloud storage can also be accessed from anywhere at any time. This is a highly desirable feature for disaster recovery in the event that on-premises infrastructure is down, including repositories for retrieving backup data.
With this release of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 GA, NAKIVO is introducing the capability to have NAKIVO target Amazon S3 storage for backups and backup copies. This also opens up other interesting features, including the ability to provide instant restores directly from Amazon S3.
This means, you can literally boot your VM from S3 storage and restore services back to end users and customers “instantly”, without a restore of the data.
Instant P2V
NAKIVO is helping customers to achieve much lower RTO values with the focus on their instant technologies here. In line with the recent additions of backups of both Windows and Linux physical servers, they are adding with this release the ability to perform instant P2Vs of the physical servers that you have backed up.
This means that you can boot your “physical” server, directly from the backup as a virtual machine. This has many use cases including testing P2V, and in times of disaster recovery, getting your “physical” boxes back up and running as quickly as possible.
Role-based access control (RBAC)
With NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.4 GA, NAKIVO has greatly improved the ability to configure RBAC in your backup environment, driven by NAKIVO.
With the new RBAC features, you have the ability to assign specific users roles within the NAKIVO environment. This includes admin, backup, recovery, and view only.
In addition to local users, you can also make use of Active Directory as the identity source for assigning users to roles. This creates an extremely powerful model of RBAC as you can make use of role-based access that you may already have in use and configured in your AD infrastructure.
Backup of Fault-tolerant VMware VMs
VMware’s fault tolerance VMs configuration allows having continuous availability in your infrastructure. Fault tolerance is setup in pairs of virtual machines. There is a primary and a secondary.
The secondary VM is kept in “lock-step” with the primary VM so that in a moments notice, if the primary VM fails, the secondary VM immediately picks up the workload without so much as a dropped packet.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 GA, NAKIVO provides the ability to protect both the primary and secondary VMs in the fault tolerance pair. Not only do you have the protection of the fault tolerance itself, you also have the added layer of data protection from NAKIVO for both fault tolerant VMs.
Instant Object Recovery to Source
I really like this new feature of NAKIVO Backup and Replication v9.4 GA. It now allows you to skip any additional steps to get application objects restored back to the source server.
Now, with the instant object recovery to source, you can recover application objects such as Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange server objects directly to the servers themselves.
This can certainly lower the RTO of these types of operations. When hours, minutes, and even seconds count, you want to be able to recover your data as quickly as possible.
Upgrading to NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 GA
If you are running a previous version of NAKIVO Backup & Replication, what is the process to upgrade to the latest v9.4 release?
Pull the latest download from the NAKIVO download update site:
Copy the update file to your /opt/nakivo/updates/ directory on your installation (in the case of the NAKIVO appliance).
Choose the Software update option in the NAKIVO virtual machine console options.
Select the updater file that is listed which was uploaded earlier.
Accept the EULA and then agree to the prompts as they are listed with the updater. You will need to ensure you don’t have any active backups or other operations running when initiating the update.
Why choose NAKIVO to handle your backups?
Let’s face it, the backup market is loaded with different vendors and many different choices and options for customers. There are many different products and solutions to choose from.
What are the strengths of the NAKIVO solution?
- Rapid development of the product – NAKIVO keeps adding great new features at a rapid pace
- Solution is extremely easy to deploy and support
- Intuitive interface
- Cloud-focused
- Many different types of hypervisor environments and hardware are supported including NAS-based backups
Wrapping up and Impressions of this release
I have been following and using NAKIVO for a few years now and have seen the product drastically evolve. They are certainly gaining a lot of momentum and incorporating great new features.
With the rapid development and ease of deployment to have all of the current capabilities, this will certainly attract many new customers, especially with their competitive pricing.
The NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4 GA release is a great new release with many new features and enhancements. You can download a free trial version of the new release here: Download NAKIVO Backup & Replication v9.4.
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