esXpress uses vStorage API for detecting changed blocks
September 3rd, 2009 | 
Author: Today at VMworld 2009 is joined a breakout session presented by PHD Virtual about their latest version of esXpress (3.6). Great stuff once again! Apart from the fact that esXpress is now fully functional on vSphere (still no ESXi support though), they also managed to use the vStorage API for “changed block reporting”. Basically what this means, is that when you are using vSphere and doing delta or deduped backups, you no longer need to read all the blocks of a VM and then decide is that block was changed or not. PHD managed to get esXpress so far that it reads only the changed blocks directly by using this “cheat sheet” that VMware was so nice to make available though the vStorage API.
What this means is, that backup speeds will be way higher when you do delta or deduped backups.
When you also use their dedup targt, with the dedup action going on on the SOURCE, you get tremendous backup speeds and as an added bonus you can use smaller WAN links when you are sending these backups offsite. Wonderfull guys, you did it again!
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If version 4.x is ever released…!! 🙂 🙂
@Tom: yeah, they need to speed up on that. I am now running both Veeam 4.1 and esXpress 3.6 next to each other… I must say esXpress still holds its ground without changed block tracking (the underlying SAN is quite big having heaps of 36GB disks so it delivers a lot of bandwidth). In environments with less IOPS to spare, Veeam will probably be taking the lead just because of CBT in their version 4.1… Still not that impressed with Veeams raw throughput, but all these features like dedup and CBT make it catch up in the end. Stay tuned for blogsposts on this!!