All software products claim simplicity and ease of use as their features, but with Archiware Pure this claim is finally justified. One of the significant obstacles in adoption of data protection solutions is the complexity that requires specialized training and hiring of dedicated administration personnel.

Our main drive in designing Archiware Pure was to offer a smart data protection solution that any system administrator can understand, and which can provide industry standard protection features out of the box. 

A lot of effort was put into smart features that automatically choose the best default values for each situations and bring reliable VM backup and restoration within everyone’s reach.

The Pure UI allows you to check the status of your system at a glance and immediately identify events that warrant your further attention. At the same time, features such as backup overview and event log allow you to visually track backup trends and predict future storage needs as well as dig into details of each important event to learn what happened at which step.

Archiware Pure protects VMware virtual machines at hypervisor level, capturing the entire VM content and configuration at once. In coordination with a vCenter or an ESXi server, a point-in-time snapshot is created without interrupting the target VM. This allows seamless backups with zero downtime for your production machines and without the need to install backup agents in each VM. 

Protecting the whole vSphere environment from a single centralized interface greatly simplifies administration and reduces operating costs. Capturing the entire VM as a single image eliminates the possibility of excluding some critical files from backup and enables straightforward recovery of both the operating system and user data.

With Archiware Pure, we wanted to create a data protection solution accessible to everyone but without compromising on any of the core features. Pure uses both the industry standard VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection and our own technology to smartly choose the best way to transfer backup data from the VM to the backup storage. 

All backups use Changed Block Tracking technology which enables Pure to only save the data that was actually changed since the last backup, speeding up backups and decreasing the required storage size. Because the most precious commodity is definitely time - and nowhere is that true more than in disaster recovery - Pure backup storage is optimized for backup and restore speed. Backups are forever incremental and completely eliminate the need for full backups. At the same time, each backup snapshot is immediately available for restore without the need for additional calculations or data extractions.

When Pure is deployed on an ESXi host that has access to the datastore holding the target VM data, backups utilize the hotadd feature to access the virtual disks directly. For VMs not directly accessible, a LAN transfer is automatically used to perform backups of remote VMs.

Since there is nothing worse then a corrupted backup, and because the experience has proven that bugs are always possible in any step in the process and that bugs can go undetected for a long time, Pure will optionally perform a data verification for each backup snapshot, making sure that the data in the backup repository corresponds byte by byte to the actual VM state. We strongly suggest enabling backup verification if possible. If the time constraints do not allow verifying all VMs every day, Pure will automatically assign higher priority to those VMs that have not had their backups verified for the longest. Multiple backup and verification jobs can be run in parallel allowing you to scale according to your needs and requirements.

We strongly believe that a good backup solution should make sure your data is fully protected and disaster recovery is properly planned. After that, it should let you focus your attention on your core business. Archiware Pure allows you to create backup and verification schedules that could be as simple or as detailed as your business requires. Once configured, backups execute automatically and without need for constant supervision. Daily email reports allow you to check the system status at a glance and keep you informed of all important events.

Backup scheduling is organized around Backup windows – time slots that you assign to Archiware Pure and within which all operations are performed. Pure will then automatically schedule backup and verification jobs, making sure that all the VMs are first backed up and then prioritizing verification according to the last verification date.

It is even possible to configure Pure to automatically schedule backups for newly discovered VMs, making this truly a configure once, run forever software.