Today we received the press release of the new Starwind iSCSI software with the all new VM Backup technology.

Starwind is an innovative company and one of the first to offer an iSCSI initiator on the Microsoft Windows platform without a lot of hassle. Now, this product has come a long way since then and it now is a full blown storage solution, you could call it enterprise grade. The new version incorporates the VM Backup technique

Now, the previous versions already had best VMware support with their own HA technology. This new version also offers this technology for Hyper-V as well. The backup solution performs all operations on host level so no backup agents are needed in virtual machines.

Additionally, a new version of HA plug-in is presented in version v5.8 that allows use of raw basic images to create HA targets. A new replication engine based on own technology instead of Microsoft’s iSCSI transport generates better performance and reliability. This brand new engine allows you to use multiple network interfaces for synchronization and heartbeat, giving you more performance in the end.

To simplify the replacement of equipment and recovery of fatal failures, StarWind has implemented the ability to change the partner node to any other StarWind server without any downtime and on the fly. Synchronization engine is improved, and this version allows both nodes to sync automatically even in the case of a full blackout of both servers.

Read up on it at their press release over here

But that’s not all… Starwind is giving away an iPad 2! Tell them what you think the best scenario is to use Starwind’s iSCSI software and you might very well be the new owner of an iPad 2! Check out the contest page here.