Customers of a dominant enterprise software supplier often shop around for specialists within their environments who do something a little better than their regular supplier. Marc Hutzell, senior systems administrator at the non-profit German Marshall Fund, is an example in virtualization software.The Fund is a non-profit in Washington, D.C., established with a gift from Germany in recognition of the key role the Marshall Plan played in post -World War II Europe. Hutzell after 3-4 years of virtualizing a small data center with VMware's ESX server, now runs the organization on 35 virtual machines spread over four hosts.

He's been using Vizioncore's vRanger Pro for most of that period and says the 3.0 version of the product, now called the vRanger Pro Data Protection Program, has made conducting his backups simpler and easier to perform. VMware through its vCenter Server suite offers its own VMware Data Recovery and other products. But Hutzell likes the user interface on vRanger Pro when it comes to scheduling both differential backups, where only changes to the last major backup are recorded, and full backups.

He also likes to be able to use the iSCSI network for his backups. Both the composition of the virtual machine and the data is using is covered by the backup, he said in an interview earlier this week.

"Backups used to take too long, and the files were too large, which would bring the network screeching to a halt," Hutzell said. "But now we can back up over the iSCSI network in the middle of the afternoon without anyone noticing. This takes away the headaches of disaster recovery and contingency planning."

Hutzell said vRanger Pro also lets him get inside a virtual machine and do a single file level restore, such as restoring a single email file in a virtualized Exchange Server directory. The backups are crucial to keeping the 200 employees of the agency equipped with the office tools and files they need to do their jobs, he said.

The German Marshall Fund of the United States is a public policy and grant-making institution founded in 1972 to promote greater cooperation between North America and Europe. It has a strong presence on both sides of the Atlantic, with offices in Berlin, Bratislava, Paris, Brussels, Belgrade, Ankara, and Bucharest.

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