Vizioncore vRanger Pro eases data restoration

Name: JEFFREY WEINSTEIN
Title: Director of network services
Company: MedManagement LLC, a diversified healthcare company
Location: Birmingham, Ala.

Favorite data center product: Vizioncore vRanger Pro

Vizioncore vRanger Pro gives me the ability to back up all of my virtual machines and the capability of restoring something, whether a domain or a single file, as it was at a point in time. That allows me to know that my clients, be they MedManagement customers or employees, are well-protected -- and it gives me a good way to sleep at night.

I have had to rely on vRanger Pro a few times since we began using it about a year and a half ago. One time a change I made to one of our servers did not work as intended, so we used vRanger Pro to restore the virtual machine as it was prior to the upgrade. Another time, a user deleted one of the directories on a server. We restored the VM from a couple different points in time so the user could tell me which file needed to be restored.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Name: JEFFREY WEINSTEIN
Title: Director of network services
Company: MedManagement LLC, a diversified healthcare company
Location: Birmingham, Ala.

Favorite data center product: Vizioncore vRanger Pro

Vizioncore vRanger Pro gives me the ability to back up all of my virtual machines and the capability of restoring something, whether a domain or a single file, as it was at a point in time. That allows me to know that my clients, be they MedManagement customers or employees, are well-protected -- and it gives me a good way to sleep at night.

I have had to rely on vRanger Pro a few times since we began using it about a year and a half ago. One time a change I made to one of our servers did not work as intended, so we used vRanger Pro to restore the virtual machine as it was prior to the upgrade. Another time, a user deleted one of the directories on a server. We restored the VM from a couple different points in time so the user could tell me which file needed to be restored.

Plus we make it a regular practice to do test restores. If you don't do test restores, and don't do them often, then you can't trust that you're going to be able to restore when something goes awry. Restore time depends on the size of the virtual machine itself, but in the example from earlier this year, restoring the VM, file shares and all, took less than 30 minutes.

On deck: Vyatta open source routing software

We're getting ready to change our WAN connectivity. We currently have three older Cisco routers. Purchasing one new Cisco router is pretty expensive, much less having to buy two of them for redundancy. So I chose to load the Vyatta open source router on top of dormant physical servers we have from the VMware consolidation.

We're able to plug in all of the circuits we have today and, as we move forward, we'll be ready to add frame connections, T-1, 10M metro Ethernet or otherwise, into this one HP ProLiant DL380 server that has redundant hard drives, power supplies and the like. And with VMware on the other servers, we'll load a second server the same way and ship the config file over on an hourly basis from the active to the passive router [for disaster recovery].

We have this in test now and are expecting within the next six months to have it live.

The servers are a sunk cost and the only thing I need from a hardware standpoint are the circuit termination cards, which cost about $1,100 each. We spent less than $3,000 for the Vyatta software, with three years of 24/7 coverage. This compares with the Cisco routers, which would cost from $5,000 to $10,000 each.

Dream tool: Offline-but-available storage

To address growing disk space requirements from virtualization, I want something that would store files, like file shares on a main company or corporate file server, almost in an offline-but-available state that would allow user access. The store would be compressed so that it would save space plus also would appear offline so we wouldn't need to back up files that haven't been accessed in quite a while or consume processor cycles or CPU with antivirus scanning and the like.