Infrascale Disaster Recovery (IDR) version 6.14 is our big summer release, and has much to offer our customers and partners in terms of improved quality-of-life changes, security features, performance improvements and bug fixes. We’d like to start by thanking all our partners, especially those that worked with us to find solid and timely solutions to not just issues, but to overall usability improvements.
The IDR v6.14 release is scheduled for public availability July 2nd, 2018.
NEED FOR SPEED
Our partners and customers will be happy to know that, in our lab, our teams were seeing massive (up to 5X) speed improvements when protecting VMware environments with v6.14.
When protecting Hyper-V, we also saw significant performance improvements by enabling backup jobs to run in parallel (improvements will be greater for those with larger appliances protecting many smaller backup jobs versus those with fewer, but larger jobs).
In both cases, the performance improvements will allow customers to more quickly get their environments protected, which means less hassle managing network and system I/O during initial and regular backups and an chance for improved restore point objective (RPO) goals (less data loss due to more frequent backups).
QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
Quality of Life (QoL) improvements make up a bulk of the line items you’ll see below in the release notes, and range from usability improvements in the GUI, to new features that allow our administrators to automate testing and verification of the integrity of backups run to time-saving additions, enjoy.
The QoL list is highlighted by the new boot verification option. This means admins can run these tests and have automated reports with screenshots of systems running to help themselves and everyone around them sleep easy knowing the system will be there for them when it counts.
In addition, there are a ton of time-savers in here like allowing administrators to perform tasks from within the secondary appliance GUI rather than having to switch to the primary, automation during initial setup and the ability to define individual disks on VMware VMs for backup rather than being limited to selecting entire VMs.
There’s a lot here, so check out the list below:
- NEW TIME SAVER: Mass-update appliance firmware from Dashboard (for firmware after 6.14.0)
- NEW PEACE OF MIND: Boot Verification of backup jobs (individual jobs, stay tuned for boot orchestration verification!)
- NEW REPORTS: Daily backup reports have added clarity regarding overall daily backups and the inclusion of the new* boot verification results
- NEW CONTROL: Ability to select specific VMWare disks within a VM to help save on local and cloud (secondary) backup space usage
- NEW: Support of IDR 550 appliance – stayed tuned for more info on this new, little workhorse for those smaller offices
- TIME SAVER: Auto-configure RAID during initial provisioning of appliance, no reboot required
- TIME SAVER: Simplification of QuickStart Wizard: no “Certificate” step, Time zone/Date/Time steps are combined for easier deployment and management of multiple IDR appliances
- TIME SAVER: Allow manual deletion of jobs from secondary appliance
- UX IMPROVEMENT: Revisited columns in Client / Summary view based on customer feedback
- UX IMPROVEMENT: Client/Summary shows date of last successful backup for each client
- UX IMPROVEMENT: Number of jobs pending replication is shown in Dashboard
- UX IMPROVEMENT: Job message logs show timestamp
- UPDATE: Default retention for new appliances is set to 3 months
- UPDATE: Automatically delete failed jobs after 7 days
- UPDATE: Protected Space calculation support for various file systems, software RAID, LVM, Windows Dynamic Disks
SECURITY
Security has long been a pillar of strength here at Infrascale, and we’ve brought some previously “upon request” options straight to your finger-tips. In addition, there are additional access controls that IT teams will appreciate, including the much in-demand ability to have multiple administrative logins. Check ’em out:
- NEW: Ability to create multiple admin accounts on appliance (command line-only)
- NEW: Email notification on login event for administrators
- NEW: Option to require an appliance-specific password for remote access via Dashboard (that’s 2 sets of credentials, now)
- NEW: Option to disallow Infrascale staff from accessing secondary appliance (we’ll ping you when needed)
- NEW: Audit logs on-demand or via daily digest emails for key events–logins, DR boots, job deletions.
- UPDATE: Email server settings support custom SMTP port and encryption
- UPDATE: Enable/disable remote access on Dashboard credentials entry screen (enabled by default)
BUGS KILLED
Every sprint, our teams dedicate a portion of their efforts to killing bugs, dead. Here are the bugs we smashed with 6.14:
- FIX: Multiple stability improvements for MS Exchange backup and recovery
- FIX: Auto-archive option is now working
- FIX: We’ve prevented a number of VMWare errors that would be thrown during backup/restore by using dynamic buffer size
- FIX: Rather than shutting off before the process finished, the auto-download firmware update will remain on until the appliance has been successfully setup
- FIX: Resolved some issues with large files replicating (but failing) to a secondary appliance (or cloud)
- FIX: Remote access and Support Tunnel stability
- FIX: Sort devices alphabetically in Orchestration
Click here to join or view our IDR v6.14 Release Webinar.
There is still a lot of summer left, stay tuned for news on the next 6.15 release for even more improvements.
Thank you!
-The Infrascale Product Team