PHD Virtual Launches Free Virtual Backup for MSFT Hyper-V

PHD Virtual Technologies, a company recently acquired by Unitrends, is rolling out free virtual backup for Microsoft (MSFT) Hyper-V.

According to the backup and disaster recovery (BDR) company, PHD Virtual Backup 7 for Hyper-V provides complete data protection for Hyper-V environments, ensuring “quick access to data with minimal impact on production applications.”

PHD Virtual Senior Product Manager Joe Noonan told Talkin’ Cloud that through this release, channel partners are now able to offer data protection for all major hypervisors — including VMware (VMW) and Citrix (CTXS) — from a single vendor.

“This gives them the ability to upsell into existing environments that deploy Hyper-V as a second hypervisor, or lead with Hyper-V agentless data protection that leverages the latest capabilities of Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2,” he said.

Noonan said this news marks the company’s “first launch into Hyper-V, and to get to market early and gain mindshare and users, we limited the functionality to local backup and made it free.

“We plan to quickly follow our free virtual backup for Hyper-V offering with paid releases that offer Instant Recovery, application specific features and efficient offsite options for disaster recovery,” he said. “We’ll also be adding major performance enhancements with our own proprietary changed block tracking.”

Noonan said the decision to support Hyper-V was due to the newest functionality in Windows Server 2012 and R2 “starting to get good traction in customer environments, especially in Europe.”

“We wanted to ensure that we had our new v7 architecture available in time for the high growth we expect to see in this space, putting a focus on simplifying backup management across hypervisors,” he said.

PHD Virtual Backup 7 for Hyper-V is available now for free for a limited time. For more details on how to obtain the solution for free, visit the company’s website.

Additionally, for those who may be unaware, Insight Venture Partners, the venture firm that has taken a major stake in IT monitoring and management vendor Kaseya, invested in Unitrends back in November 2013.

Follow CJ Arlotta on Twitter @cjarlotta for further updates on the story above.