Pancetera Releases New Virtual Storage Software

A new company set up by former corporate executives from data deduplication seller Data Domain today made an announcement about they have appeared from development with a fresh product directed at streamlining the management of backups in virtual server environments.
Pancetera Software, set up 2 years back, revealed its first product, Pancetera Unite, a virtual appliance that may manage backups across an infinite virtual server environment, relieving sysadmins of the chore of employing backup agents on virtual machines (VMs).
Pancetera Unite runs on a VM and create backup export mount points together with a single mangement view of a virtual server backup environment, according to Bart Bartlett, VP of promoting for the company. It runs irrespective of the backend storage type, be it network-attached storage (NAS) or a storage area network (SAN).
Startup guarantees inexpensive virtual storage
"This gives you a simplified view into your entire VMware storage infrastructure, independent of the underlying storage topology," Bartlett said.
Storage directors are shown an index that points towards an artificial file system that represents each of a server farm's hypervisors. The base files on those VMs are then exposed to the Combine software and can be backed up in part or as an entire.
"You just back up the Unite mount point," Bartlett said.
Unite uses VMware's printed APIs for block-level access to the VMware environment. The product in addition has been architected to increase into other hypervisor environments.
Logan Lemming, chief of IT for California's El Dorado County Office of Education, announced server virtualization had authorized his IT team to be more reactive, and also "dropped an iron curtain" round his storage that kept them from interacting with VM file systems. He'd been using what he called costly and complicated agent-based backup software.
"Pancetera Unite blows that whole paradigm away," he said in an announcement. "With Pancetera Unite, my environment is unlocked again. I can interact directly with my virtual file system, determining when and how to backup my systems depending on my organization's needs, not which features I've licensed."
Pancetera Unite includes a few features, eg SmartView, which gives a single, unified view of all virtual storage across hypervisors and data storage. The tool permits sysadmins to read, move and copy VM files in a Windows explorer view of a single network drive the same way the contents of any Windows folder can be manipulated.
Pancetera's SmartRead is targeted at reducing storage I / O by getting rid of new blocks of data from the backup process.
"VMs are commonly oversubscribed," Bartlett said. "Plenty of times, you could have a 20GB virtual machine disk that might only have 4GB of in-use data a Windows file system is using. We just read the 4GB and ... Clean up the remainder of the file.

Bartlett told that by running VM backups through Pancetera Unite, up to eighty percent of the traffic can be dumped.