INTRODUCING SOLARWINDS BACKUP

February 6, 2018 is a historic day. 

After months of planning, collaboration, and late night efforts, the journey of SolarWinds Backup is ready for primetime!  We are pleased to announce that SolarWinds Backup is officially launching and Generally Available today to our core market of IT professionals.  This launch is one more way we’re driving even more innovation in our Orion portfolio of products, and backup is a natural fit with our existing systems management capabilities.  You rely on SolarWinds for comprehensive monitoring of your servers and applications, for remote control and administration of these assets, and now, we can help you solve your backup and recovery challenges as well.

While most in-house IT departments have some type of backup solution, there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the options they currently use.  In November, we conducted a survey on THWACK, and heard from our customer base that:

• Backups are too expensive, and managing them is too complex
• Reliability of backups is an issue, requiring time-consuming manual checking
• Managing and forecasting local storage requirements for backups is painful

You can read more on the full survey results here: Is Unnecessary Complexity Making Backups a Headache For You?

SolarWinds Backup changes the game by bringing a simple, powerful, and affordable alternative to the market.  It’s a modern, fully managed, cloud-first backup service, already chosen by thousands of managed service providers, now packaged for the enterprise and direct use by IT professionals.

It's tough to consume an entire product in a single blog post, so this inaugural posting will provide the highlights of our new hotness!  In future posts, we'll follow up with more "How-To" guidance on specific topics and get you rapidly backing up your IT environment in minutes.  If you are chomping at the bit, feel free to browse our new SolarWinds Backup forum on THWACK with the latest in release notes, documentation and step-by-step training videos.

THE ARCHITECTURE

There are two primary interfaces you'll find when you start your journey with SolarWinds Backup, and generally you should be able to use them without training or instruction.  As you move into more advanced topics, we will provide you with the resources you need.   On day 1, two parts are all you need to know to get started.

Part 1: The Console: http://backup.management

Deploy, monitor, report, manage users, create profiles, and remotely control all your backups from this unified, self-service console.

Part 2: Backup Manager (the agent)

The Backup Manager agent does all the heavy lifting on protected end-points (i.e., devices, servers, instances).  The key functions of the agent are to scan data, find block level changes, deduplicate, compress, encrypt, optimize data file size for speed, and much more all behind the scenes.

UNDER THE HOOD

TrueDelta technology

SolarWinds Backup includes a unique TrueDelta technology that tracks block-level changes between backups, so you only back up (or restore) what has changed – not the entire file. This keeps backup windows short, only transmits the minimal amount of changed data to be backed up over the network, and improves performance overall.

Direct-to-cloud backup

The SolarWinds Backup services were designed from the ground up for fast, efficient, remote backups. You can skip the hassles of configuring local and remote backups, storage provisioning, and storage capacity planning. Instead, your backups go safely to our global purpose-built private cloud, with backup windows measured typically in minutes, not hours.  Manage your storage pool and capacity intuitively from the Console.

End-to-end security

Encryption is built into our backup process. Backup data is encrypted at the source, stays encrypted while in transit, and while at rest.

Single, unified management console

Protect physical, virtual, and cloud servers, including all major operating systems and hypervisors, with a single product. One unified web-based dashboard shows you backup status at a glance, and frees you to check systems, and even do restores, from any location – even from your mobile device.  Do you have the need for backing up workstations, laptops or just certain documents?  Not a problem, as our solution covers these capabilities also!

Recovery options

Whether you need to recover an entire server or VM, an application, or just a portion of a file, SolarWinds Backup handles it.

• Recover at WAN speed or LAN speed, using the optional Local SpeedVault 

• Physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual recovery automates a full system restore to VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V

• Bare-metal recovery simplifies and reduces recovery time for Windows servers, and can be used for migration to new hardware
• Cloud recovery targets provide even more flexibility by allowing recovery to Microsoft Azure, or to any other virtual environment of your choice

Secure remote storage for your backup data, worldwide

SolarWinds Backup provides world-class storage for your backup data with around-the-clock security in our data centers located on four continents. For the Backup Services, our data centers’ certifications meet requirements for HIPAA compliance and similar legal and regulatory standards. The Backup Services are scalable and can grow with your business.

LICENSING AND ROI

Pricing for SolarWinds Backup is straightforward and based on an annual subscription with tiers based on the number of operating system instances (servers) being protected. Each tier includes a block of cloud storage, so there are no extra charges or hidden costs.

SolarWinds Backup is the simple, powerful, affordable option.  The product’s simplicity and ease of management translate to even greater savings, as personnel do not need extensive training or certification. There is no need to buy expensive local storage to support backups, or even to pay for a separate contract for cloud provided storage.  It’s all included.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

WHAT ELSE?

Don't see what you are looking for here?

Visit the SolarWinds Backup Forum

Check out the What We're Working On for SolarWinds Backup post for what our dedicated team of backup developers and code jockeys are already looking at. 

If you don't see everything you've been wishing for there, add it to the SolarWinds Backup Feature Requests.