Before you all go screaming to your local vendor let me elaborate, the product has just had it’s name changed to reflect a new corporate direction. esXpress is now called PHD Virtual Backup for ESX.
So why the change? Well this is for a number of reasons, firstly they have just announced PHD Virtual Backup for Citrix XenServer, and esXpress as a product name does not match. However, I personally think that a more likely reason for the change is that they have secured another round of venture capital, OK so why exactly should that affect a product name.
Well one of the investors in this round of funding is none other than Citrix and maybe they did not want to be associated with a company that has one of its main competitors flagship products name it it’s core product set.
That said overall this product name change makes sense as PHD are diversifying their product set by letting it address different hypervisor sets. This is a sensible approach, especially in these days of Cloud where the hypervisor is not the be all and end all solution. PhD has positioned itself for the possibility of tiered hypervisor levels dependent on SLA’s as well as integration into other Citrix products like XenDesktop, which lacks a built in backup and recovery tool.
On top of it all a name like “esXpress for XenServer” would be a little ironic.