Software developer Altaro launches Hyper-V backup for small businesses

Altaro Software, developer of backup solutions for small office-home office set-ups and small businesses, has announced the general availability of its Hyper-V Backup for SMEs.

Hyper-V is a Windows Server virtualisation platform that allows the consolidation of workloads onto a single physical server.

The freeware version, available to backup up to two virtual machines, is the industry’s first instance of free backup software for Hyper-V.

Built on Altaro’s philosophy of combining performance with usability, Hyper-V Backup was developed from the ground up with two main objectives: to allow small and medium-sized businesses to suitably protect their virtual machines without investing in costly solutions or expensive specialised IT staff, and to enable them to minimise backup time.

The software is fully Hyper-V aware, takes five minutes to install and configure and does not require knowledge of the inner workings of Hyper-V.

By taking advantage of Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy technology, Altaro – a Microsoft BizSpark Partner – has designed this offering to allow hot back-ups, ensuring that the virtual machines can keep running smoothly even during the actual backup process.

“The development of Hyper-V Backup came about from our own necessity,” Altaro chief executive officer David Vella said.

“We found all other Hyper-V backup solutions falling into two, insufficient, extreme categories. They were either overly simplistic yet required the administrator to understand all the ins and outs of Hyper-V, or they were bulky and expensive and, although they did the job, they were very complex to configure.

“We realised there was a huge gap in the market for a user-friendly, well-priced Hyper-V backup solution.”

Users have so far been impressed with the latest Altaro offering. Femi Adegoke, IT director at the West Gastroenterology Medical Group, described it as “an easy-to-use solution that does exactly what it says on the tin!”

David Wilson, IT manager at the Belgrave Heights School said: “I love how simple everything is, it just works first time every time!”

Co-founded in 2009 by Julian Pace Ross, David Vella and Simon Attard, Altaro Software is a developer of user-friendly backup solutions aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. Its products including Oops!Backup, Backup FS and Hyper-V Backup – which have been lauded in the inter-national IT press – are avail-able worldwide from Altaro and its network of value added resellers.