Asigra this week is set to announce an enhanced version of its distributed online backup and recovery software for protecting remote offices within the enterprise.

Televaulting 6.0, an agentless disk-based backup product, now includes support for DB2, Oracle 10g and SQL 8.0 databases, allowing uninterrupted operation during backup activities. The software also includes a block-level resume feature for Oracle; if a connection is lost, the backup session can continue at the block level instead of the file level, thereby maintaining a high service level, according to the company.

Among the new features are:

Support for Macintosh computers and VMware virtual machine deployments.

An online interface that lets administrators monitor and manage remote site implementations.

Bare Metal Restore capability for Windows environments, which allows administrators to recover operating systems, configuration settings and data to any location.

A data migration engine that makes it possible to move backup sets, thus enabling backup consolidation.

In Televaulting, data from remote offices is backed up to the central data center over an IP network. Remote offices receive software called the DS-client, which collects data from file servers and desktop computers and sends it in an encrypted and compressed format to the DS-System software, which runs on a Solaris, Windows, Linux or Macintosh server. Data is stored on disk, where it can be retrieved quickly.

Chris Powell, director of IT for Backup Technology, a service provider in Leeds, England, is impressed by Televault's support of Macintosh desktops and servers.

"The biggest change for us with 6.0 is the introduction of a Macintosh client and server-based software, so we can support those customers that have Macs in their environment," Powell says. "About 10% of our customers use Macs. Previously, backing up Macs was a workaround for us."