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Business recovery solutions specialist Unitrends unveiled Release 8.0, a significant upgrade of the data protection software powering the company’s physical and virtual backup and recovery appliances.
Offering expanded support for the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP), Release 8.0 provides midsize to large enterprises with protection for EMC and NetApp network-attached storage (NAS) arrays. Release 8.0 will be available for the UEB virtual appliance and Recovery-Series physical appliances on Dec. 1 of this year.
As part of the ongoing Unitrends Not For Resale (NFR) program, free licenses of UEB 8.0 will be available to Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, Microsoft Certified Professionals, VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals, VMware Certified Instructors and VMUG members.
The software also expands the company’s support for virtual environments, featuring data protection and disaster recovery capabilities for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.
“Due to budgetary constraints, most SMBs do not have a plethora of IT staff that is experienced in data protection. Additionally, SMBs typically don’t have the expertise to consider all the critical needs when selecting a data protection solution,” Subo Guha, Unitrends’ vice president of product management, told eWEEK. “In addition to considering price, SMBs should select solutions that are simple to use, adapt to their business growth needs and are backed by a customer support experience that goes out of the way to offset the lack of IT professionals within their organization.”
Guha said a common mistake small businesses make is not including disaster recovery planning deeply enough in their initial projects.
“They feel local backup is the key priority and then often find it difficult to extend the solution to disaster recovery properly, finding that they later have to extend or add solutions in a way that doesn’t best meet their business needs,” he said. “Gartner estimates that only 35 percent of SMBs have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place.”
Through deep virtualization at the guest and hypervisor levels, Unitrends’ virtual and physical appliances are capable of quickly recovering Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs), as well as leveraging Hyper-V for failover of physical Windows machines.
The company’s Bridge technology supports one-click physical to virtual (P2V) transformation from a Windows guest backup to a standby VM running on Hyper-V.
In addition, Bridge now delivers one-click recovery for Hyper-V host operating system (HOS) backups.
By booting up the VM directly from UEB or Recovery-Series backup storage, organizations can reduce recovery time objectives (RTOs), and can also recover the VM to a different Hyper-V host or recover from replicated backups offsite.
The latest version of the Unitrends software also delivers protection for the Mac 10.9 and HP-UX 11 operating systems, and with Hyper-V Server 2012 and higher, organizations can run VMs from SMB 3.0 shares.
The release also protects these VMs at the hypervisor level, eliminating the need to manage agents for every virtual machine.
“Failure to have a holistic data protection solution that covers all of their data and application protection, whether it be physical systems or virtual, is a big risk to SMBs,” Guha said. “Having a contingency plan to help protect from downtime or disaster is also critical, requiring new projects that take cloud services into account for meeting business needs on a limited budget, with limited expertise.”