New HP LeftHand Recovery Manager - file recovery made easy!

[#1]

By Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy

I get to announce a new product to you today and I have a short podcast and a video demo to help you get the details. 

The new solution is called HP LeftHand Recovery Manager.  Recovery Manager is a wizard driven software product that saves you time and  effort to recover files from Windows snapshots.  Recovery Manager helps you to find the snapshots, determine how many you want to keep available and then find files you want to recover.  I have a short PowerPodcast (about 4 minutes) explaining what Recovery Manager can do and a video demo (about 7 minutes).

First, the PowerPodcast

In my 94th edition of Around the Storage Block podcast, I talk to Tim Doering - an HP LeftHand expert - about the new product.  Here's the podcast with Tim.  

If you rather download this as a podcast now, just right-click here and save the MP3 file. You can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes - go to the iTunes store and search for "Around the Storage Block" or you can open this link and click on the "View in iTunes" button under my picture. 

How about a video demo too?

Tim and I also did a video demo - if you have a few more minutes and want to see Recovery Manager in action, this video is about 7 minutes long.  As you'll see, the software is easy to use and will make it easy for our customers to recover files from Windows-based snapshots.  Check out the video:

 (Note: this is an HD quality video and you can watch it in full screen mode to get a better view of the demo).

Wanna learn more?

I love solutions that help make IT simple - and as you can see HP Recovery Manager does exactly that.  Here are a few links to help you learn more:

• You can download HP Recovery Manager from www.hp.com/go/lefthanddownloads
• If you want to try a full featured trial of HP LeftHand, we have a 60-day trial of our HP LeftHand VSA: www.hp.com/go/TryVSA
• If you aren't at all familiar with the HP LeftHand family, here's a link to the family page where you can explore more.
• I recently did a series of "hands-on-labs" (HOL) with our LeftHand VSA and have videos of those HOLs you can check out.  They're listed with the latest one on the top of the page so to make sense of this, start from the bottom and work your way up.

As always, I'm happy to answer questions (or I should say, forward questions to Tim!) - so just leave a comment with your question. 

[#2]

What about taking this one step further and making the recovery available through Windows' native VSS/Previous Versions interface the way some competing products do it?

[#3]

Hi KOhayasu0001 - keep in mind that HP LeftHand is a block-based storage solution.  I don't believe any competiting block-based storage solution uses VSS "Previous Versions" feature of Windows Server.  There might be NAS products out there that take advantage of this and we can as well using our HP LefHand Unified NAS Gateway or X3000 (Windows-based NAS solution) gateway.  As far as I know, no vendor has "previous version" feature with block storage. If you think I'm mistaken, please let me know.

[#4]

Hi,

Is there a solution for mounting snapshots that are formatted VMFS?

We have VMFS on all our volumes with datastores sitting on that with NTFS vmdk disks stored with the VMs

[#5]

Hi Calvin,

Thanks for sharing m8, great info!

Keep up the good work!

[#6]

@PMat - there isn't a way of doing this today though the team is already looking at this for a future release of Recovery Manager.

@Eric - thanks and good to "see you" here.  Hoping you make it to HP Discover in Frankfurt and we have the chance to catch up.

[#7]

I've an open ticket which has been escalated, looking for the URI for formal technical documention of the 'HP Recovery Manager' product which you mention in your blog post.  Is there one that you would suggest?

[#8]

Hi Russ - the technical documentation is there when you download the software.  Go to www.hp.com/go/lefthanddownloads and click on receive for free - from there you can select either the software or the documentation. Here's a screenshot to help you with that:

[#9]

I love a bit of LeftHand, so this is excellent news, but I must say that it is about time too!

Rivals have had this functionality for a long time; think - NetApp SnapManager, Compellent Replay Manager, EqualLogic Auto-Snap Manager - which are just a few I could think of.

[#10]

Hi Calvin, I've just started using the Recovery Manager. It's not bad, it would be better if they let you auto-mount remote snapshots for sites that take advantage of that feature. 

[#11]

@Khai - just talked to the product manager and he said they've heard this request a few times and it's on the list of enhancements that are under consideration for a future release.  Glad you find value in the software - I think it's great that HP offers it for free.