Unitrends announced the public beta version of its Unitrends Free virtual data protection software.
Features in Unitrends Free include vSphere and Hyper-V Backup for unlimited virtual machines (VMs) and Sockets, providing hypervisor-level protection for up to 1 terabyte (TB) of data.
Free also makes it possible to run a VM directly from a backup to reduce downtime. Instant recovery capabilities allow users to spin up copies of their VMs for recovery verification, testing and development.
“We want to build a community of IT professionals who use Unitrends Free as a vehicle for not only virtual backup, but also for business continuity,” Mark Campbell, the company’s chief technology officer, told eWEEK. “Additionally, we want to cultivate a community of channel partners who use Unitrends Free to increase their lead generation, profitability and recurring revenue. Free is a community-inspired, community-driven product that will play a key role in guiding the company’s future business continuity R&D efforts.”
Users can also take advantage of low- cost, long-term storage through integration with third-party clouds such as Google Cloud Storage, Google Nearline and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), the company said.
The product features user-friendly scheduling with daily recovery points, and delivers changed-block tracking and incremental forever backups to ensure that backups complete every day.
“There will be an increasing focus on business continuity both on premises and in the cloud, and advanced continuity techniques for not only virtual, such as VMware vSphere,” Microsoft Hyper-V and other environments, but physical environments as well, Campbell said. “There will also be an emphasis on recovery assurance, which moves a business from having recovery point objective and recovery time objective goals to enabling recovery time actuals through application-level recovery assurance.”
He noted that additionally, a new form of heterogeneity–virtualization heterogeneity–will become increasingly important, which means not just virtual machines, but also containers.
Users benefit from limitless support provided by the company’s community, as the user interface is directly integrated into the Unitrends Free community, allowing IT professionals to search the forum and collaborate.
Campbell said for businesses, confidence that their backup and continuity software is simple and intuitive enough so that they don’t spend precious time constantly trying to understand its use, is of paramount importance.
“That confidence, that they can get not only their files, virtual and physical servers and infrastructure back, but, more importantly, get their business back operating in a short amount of time, is critical,” he said. “What our customers tell us is that it’s not about backup any more, it’s about cloud-empowered business continuity.”