Many readers will be familiar with DigiVault, the Exchange Server backup and recovery product from Lucid8. In the years that DigiVault has been on the market, Microsoft Exchange Server has undergone several versions, with resulting changes—most notably and recently a change in the way Exchange backups work. As a result, Lucid8's DigiVault has also change greatly, and with the new version released today, it also comes with a new name: Exchange Protection Manager (EPM).
EPM provides continuous data protection for Exchange Server 2010/2007/2003, and also gives you the ability to do granular restores. EPM has moved from the log shipping method of backup that DigiVault used to Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)–based backup that current versions of Exchange require. Additionally, you can configure EPM to make snapshot backups as frequently as every 15 minutes with no impact on end users, thereby providing plenty of recovery points for data.
The recovery piece of EPM lets you restore whole databases, mailboxes, or individual items and doesn't require you to use recovery storage groups or recovery databases as is typical. Instead, it taps into the recovery technology already available from another Lucid8 product, DigiScope. "We took the core of DigiScope and we stuck it into EPM," said Lucid8 CEO Troy Werelius. "So instead of having to worry about making special granular recovery backups or doing second passes at the database in order to get any type of granularity, we simply do a straight, high-speed, VSS backup, and then we can crack that open and give customers anything they want back. If they want to restore the whole database, that's fine. Or a handful of mailboxes, folders, granular items—they can do it on the fly without interrupting users' workflow."
Werelius also believes that customers will respond to the pricing for EPM, which he describes as "just a fraction of competitive offerings." EPM pricing starts at $399 per server for unlimited mailboxes. As Werelius said, "Backup's easy. Recovery's the one that gets people fired." Nobody wants to find they have backups that don't work or that they can't restore the items users need in a timely manner. Check out Lucid8's website for more information about Exchange Protection Manager to see if it's the right tool for your organization. And you can see a short photo gallery of screenshots from the product below.
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