Quadric Software

Faster Backups and More Control with Alike 4.1

Alike 4.1 is here! With performance upgrades and new features that offer faster backups and more control over your environment, 4.1 is designed to increase efficiency and save time and resources. When you upgrade to the latest version of Alike, you’ll benefit from significant memory reduction, increased job speed, and optimal scalability.

Protect Only What You Want with Individual Drive Selection

Not only can you select all the guests on a host for a job in Alike, but now in 4.1, you can also select individual drives on VMs that have multiple disks. The flexibility to backup individual drives saves both time and valuable storage space that you can use for other resources. Because of the drag and drop feature introduced in 4.0, selecting individual disks in 4.1 is quick and easy.

I/O Performance Improvements Cut I/O by More Than Half

A design philosophy of Alike has always been to do as much as possible while being respectful of your valuable system resources. That’s why the performance upgrades in 4.1 are designed to significantly reduce I/Os for Alike’s data processing, as well as greatly lower Windows (caching) memory utilization. In fact, in some of our internal testing, Alike 4.1 reduced the I/O operations on the Alike Server enough that the data validation in 4.1 is 13x faster!

For larger or busy environments, this change can make a huge difference in terms of storage efficiency, use, and scalability. The more data you’re moving simultaneously, the faster background maintenance operations will be, which means more IOPs to spare to do other things.

Greatly Speed up Initial Backups

The first time Alike backs up a system, the amount of work the initial backups take can be slower than subsequent backups. Thanks to global deduplication, the backups following the initial backup take a fraction of the time. But for large environments, getting through this round of “initial backups” can take a considerable amount of time. That’s why we designed the new “Loose Deduplication Caching” option in Alike v4.1.

Now Alike can detect when you’re performing an initial backup of a system that’s similar to one it has already protected, and dramatically reduce the job time. If you have a large environment with many similar VMs (cloned servers, VDI infrastructure, etc.), this feature is designed for you. Please note: this option is not enabled by default, so to enable this option, go to System Settings, scroll down to the Advanced Settings, and check the box next to “Allow loose dedup cache matching on initial backups.” You can read more about this feature and how/when to use it in our KB article.

Get More Done in Less Time

One of the best new features in Alike 4.1 is the ability to backup multiple VMs within a single job, at the same time. This offers more flexibility in protecting your environment and meeting your backup windows. Instead of waiting to complete a VM backup before starting the next one, you can configure how many VMs you want Alike to process at the same time, within the same job. In addition to decreasing your overall backup window, we’ve also made it possible for you to view the progress of all the running VMs in one screen with a convenient new design feature (see image below).

Better Performance. Higher efficiency. Faster Backups.

We based these changes in 4.1 on customer feedback and our dedication to being the best BDR solution in the industry. Whether you’re protecting a large or small environment, the enhanced performance, reduced memory utilization, and faster backups in 4.1 save you time and resources.

About Alike

Flexible and easy to use, Alike offers a competitive and comprehensive suite of scalable, intuitive backup and recovery solutions for XenServer, Hyper-V, and Windows-based physical systems. Our Alike backup solutions secure your data and protect your business from even the worst disaster, while ensuring that you are up and running again quickly. For more information or questions about pricing, contact us at any time to get a custom quote for your business. Or try Alike for free today!