Zmanda spruces up Windows cloud backup

Open-source data backup software company Zmanda Inc. is releasing version 2.0 of its Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) for Windows today.

New features include:

• Geography control - customers can tag data so that it’s backed up to a cloud data center in a certain region. For ecample, users in Europe can specify data that has to stay in Europe per European Union regulations. Customers can also choose to send data to data centers closest to their location for better performance of data migrations and retrieval over the network.
• Selective restore - the ability to restore one file from a data set; not new for Zmanda’s main backup product, but new for ZCB.
• Windows Security Certificate Encryption - Previously data sent to the cloud through ZCB was encrypted using standard AES encryption; support for the Windows certificate “is the highest level of encryption for Windows systems,” said Zmanda CEO Chander Kant. “It means they can use the same certificate they’re used to if they encrypt files on their Windows server and can make bare-metal restores for DR easier.”

Zmanda Cloud Backup 1.0 was first released last December. Kant said there are currently about 100 customers using it to backup systems to the cloud.