We are pleased to announce availability of SolarWinds® Backup 18.6 release, including early access availability of SolarWinds Backup for Office 365 Exchange services. This release adds some new features, additional data centers, and performance improvements.

NOTE : If you are one of our Software Only partners, and use your own storage nodes, make sure to read the important message about the storage node software at the end of this post. (**)

Simple, modern data protection for Office 365® Exchange Services

With this release, we are introducing early access availability of the SolarWinds Backup for Office 365 solution. SolarWinds Backup for Office 365 complements and extends the basic data protection offered by Microsoft.  The solution is designed to offer protection and instant recovery of your Office 365 Exchange services data (email, calendars, contacts, tasks) for up to seven years. It is also designed to help support compliance and help eliminate the inherent risks of data loss associated with Microsoft Office 365.

SolarWinds Backup for Office 365 is managed from the https://backup.management Console, without any additional software to install. Use the Add Wizard in the Console to connect to an Office 365 domain. Unlimited usage at no additional charge is available through Sept. 30, 2018 via the Early Access Program. Billable usage begins Oct. 1. For more information about pricing, please contact your SolarWinds account representative.

Performance Upgrades

We have completed some performance upgrades and fine-tuning of back-end processes, including:

• Backup Accelerator V2: The background scanning engine that detects data changes between backup jobs now runs 24X7, with greater efficiency and for more file types than in v1. This allows for even more frequent, and faster backups.
• Other back-end enhancements and bug fixes for better backup performance.

New Datacenters

We have added physical storage in some new datacenters globally including Denmark, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.

**Storage Nodes – Update Recommended for “Software Only” partners!

In order to take advantage of the performance optimizations introduced in this version, it is necessary for our “Software Only” partners (those hosting their own private cloud storage) to update all of their Storage Nodes to the latest version.

The latest Storage Node software installers can be found in the Advanced Download section of the Management Console or on the download section of our website.  A video walk through is available for Windows and Linux storage nodes.