Data backup and recovery has always been critical for business. But with so many new threats emerging every day–from natural disasters, data loss, and even ransomware– simply locking data up using legacy backup systems and tools isn’t enough to make modern enterprises more resilient. It’s now crucial for enterprises to deploy better, smarter tools that help protect essential data at the speed, currency, and simplicity needed to run a successful business.
Unitrends, the global leader of all-in-one enterprise backup and continuity solutions, seeks to provide the tools today’s modern enterprise needs to safeguard critical IT assets, helping companies stay secure and invincible. Unitrends offers a broad portfolio of backup, cloud continuity, disaster recovery, and recovery assurance solutions to protect diverse environments–and they are all available at the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry and with minimal management burden for IT admins.
Joseph Noonan, the VP of Product Marketing and Management at Unitrends
SourceForge recently spoke with Joseph Noonan, the VP of Product Management & Marketing at Unitrends, to discuss the importance of data backup and recovery, as well as how Unitrends and their range of solutions are helping enterprises ensure business continuity. Unitrends also shared some insights and predictions about trends shaping up the future of disaster recovery.
Q: Unitrends leverages high-availability hardware and software engineering to provide IT professionals with products and solutions that help consumers focus on their business instead of their backup. Can you provide us with a brief background of the company?
A: Unitrends was founded in 1989, and is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts. Unitrends is the global leader of all-in-one enterprise backup and continuity solutions servicing all major markets and industries.
Q: Generally speaking, why are backup appliances a must for IT professionals and companies? And in your opinion, what makes for a good backup system or solution?
A: Appliances dramatically reduce the overhead of protecting your data and applications. If you were to build your own backup and recovery solution, you would probably have to integrate dozens of different pieces of software and hardware – servers, storage, deduplication, OS, security, analytics, search, monitoring…. Unfortunately, many vendors ask you to take that approach by partnering with other suppliers rather than building their own total solution.
The amount of time you will have to spend managing the solution is directly proportional to the number of servers and components you have to install, manage, and maintain. Time is money.
Unitrends’ all-in-one integrated approach is designed specifically to reduce time and money spent on continuity. A Unitrends appliance enables IT to deploy a single, complete solution, purpose-built to perform data and application protection. The Unitrends all-in-one appliance is easier to install, upgrade, and manage, able to protect more than 300 computing platforms, including virtual systems, physical Windows and Linux systems, legacy systems, and cloud workloads deployed in hyperscale clouds such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. A modern, intuitive user experience makes it possible to operate your backup system without referring to a manual so substitutes or managers can stand in when primary admins are unavailable.
Q: Unitrends strives to increase uptime, productivity, and confidence among IT professionals with their product lineup. Can you share some additional information about your backup VMware products? What sets these Unitrends products and solutions apart in the market?
A: Unitrends VMware management capabilities are deeply integrated with vCloud, vCenter and other VMware platforms. Unitrends protection for VMware VMs (including ESXi and ESXi Free) are optimized for low RPO and near zero RTO, while offering enterprise-level business continuity. Unitrends provides full VMware vSphere support including:
- NBD compression
- VMFS 6 datastores
- VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs)
- Backup and replication of fault-tolerant virtual machines (VMs)
- vSAN 6.6
- Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM)
- Guest and Hypervisor-Level VMware Backup
All VMware backup options provide application-level awareness to ensure data consistency, as well as instant recovery and global deduplication for fast recovery and maximum retention. Unitrends also offers application-aware backups for VMware VMs running Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint and SQL without requiring agents in each and every VM.
Screenshot of Unitrend’s backup summary report.
Unitrends SLA Policy Automation for VMware sets up all aspects of VMware backup, replication and archiving in a single step based on a simple RPO policy. Unitrends automates the entire process, including the analytics for recovery times, giving you clear, provable RPO and RTO data.
Policy-based Dynamic VM Inclusion easily manages changes to your environment. Dynamic detection and inclusion of new virtual machines include new VMs into a protection policy without any manual intervention. The policies can be at the virtual machine level or at a virtual element level (data store, cluster, host, resource pool, folder etc.).
VMware backups can be used as part of a cloud-empowered disaster recovery and business continuity program. All Unitrends Recovery Series hardware and Unitrends Backup virtual appliances include cloud integration so you can easily benefit from Cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service that reduces downtime in the event of a major outage. Recover your VMware backups with Unitrends Cloud and our DRaaS services, or migrate, failover, and failback to 3rd party clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Unitrends Boomerang easily and inexpensively replicates your VMware VMs to low-cost AWS S3 or Azure Blob storage, until needed.
One of the more advanced features that Unitrends offers VMware customers is Ransomware detection and recovery. Using Machine learning, Unitrends automates checks for traces of ransomware through identification of behavioral anomalies. Unitrends is able to identify when Ransomware is suspected. In addition to detection, Unitrends Recovery Assurance automates backup testing and verification to ensure that your backup data can restore your system as planned in the event of Ransomware attack. Successful recovery needs to be free of ransomware and Unitrends is able to identify working backups for recovery.
Q: Can you explain the process of backing up or replicating and recovering business data?
A: Unitrends Backup employs global deduplication with Unitrends Adaptive Deduplication, which leverages efficient integration between Recovery Series job content and the variable block-size deduplication algorithm. Replication with Adaptive Deduplication and compression for WAN optimization ensures faster data transfers and improved storage utilization; only block-level changes are replicated, dramatically reducing network and storage consumption. Byte-level encryption ensures secure data transmission.
Overview of a standard recovery compliance report.
Unitrends appliances are designed for hybrid-cloud or on-premises use and as such support bandwidth throttling, replication, deduplication, encryption and recovery of physical-to-virtual, virtual-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical, so regardless of your backup needs, we have you covered.
With the Unitrends Recovery Series backup appliance solution, customers have a number of options for validating, restoring, or retrieving protected data. The solution supports standard backup, restore, and replication functionality as well as integration with optional data protection servers such as Unitrends Cloud and Unitrends Disaster Recovery Services (DRaaS). In addition, Unitrends also offers application-aware recovery and backups for VMware VMs running Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint and SQL without requiring agents in each and every VM.
Q: Security is a major concern when it comes to data backup, especially in industries such as government, healthcare, etc. So how safe is data stored on backup VMware? What sort of security and encryption methods does Unitrends use to ensure a secure environment?
A: All data is encrypted in transit and at rest using AES-256 bit by default.
The following encryption values are available:
- AES 16
- AES 24
- AES 32
- CAST5 16
- CAST6 16
- CAST6 32
- DES3 EDE 24
Unitrends Cloud data centers are SSAE 16 certified. The Unitrends Cloud is also compliant with many other industry certifications, such as SOC 2, HIPAA, CJIS, and PCI.
Q: What is Boomerang for VMware? And why do businesses need it?
A: Businesses can recover 18X Faster using Unitrends Boomerang than with AWS VPC Protection.
Boomerang solves three major problems for VMware users:
- Fast VM replication into the cloud. Boomerang installs in less than one hour, auto-discovers and replicates your VMs in low-cost AWS S3 or AWS S3 IA to keep cloud fees at an absolute minimum. Automatically drives scheduled incremental, block-level backups. Boomerang rehydrates backups as ready-to-run VMs to copy back to your datacenter on command.
- Uniquely low-cost disaster recovery – on-premises or in the cloud. Unlike alternative solutions, Boomerang doesn’t use costly live Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) in AWS EC2 running in compute mode 24×7. In the event of a system failure, Boomerang’s “Pilot Light” feature quickly auto-converts VMs replicated in inexpensive AWS S3 to native AMIs, and spins them up in EC2. When the issue is resolved, a few clicks reverse the conversion and brings everything back to your data center. The cost savings can be huge.
- Full VM migration to the cloud. Easily migrates your VMware VMs to the cloud, eliminating the need for VMware licenses. Change your mind? Boomerang can bring it all back to your data center.
Q: Unitrends offers Boomerang, a recovery solution that installs, auto-discovers, and takes a snapshot of your VMs in as little as 15 minutes to then store backups in low-cost AWS S3, or Microsoft Azure cloud, until needed. So what makes Boomerang an effective disaster recovery solution?
A: Boomerang uses low-cost AWS S3 or AWS S3 IA and avoids consuming costly EC2 compute resources until needed for disaster recovery, keeping cloud usage fees incredibly low. Further, Boomerang saves users time, minimizes bandwidth costs, and can significantly reduce software license fees. Boomerang, at $19.95/VM/month, is the lowest cost solution in the market, with no maintenance, support, or professional services fees.
Q: Looking ahead, do you see anything on the horizon that could shape the future of disaster recovery? Will there be any new technologies, features, or tools that will affect the industry?
A: AI and Machine learning are probably the two biggest trends shaping the future of DR. Backup tools sit in a very strategic location, touching all corporate data, and advancements in AI are already starting to neutralize security threats, direct backups to the best storage option, mitigate performance issues and enhance operational efficiencies.
Moving forward, DR solutions will employ AI in Ransomware Detection and recovery, business policy automation, recovery automation, and IT Resilience.
About Unitrends
Helping IT professionals do more with less, Unitrends offers all-in-one backup appliances that bring simplicity, high-speed performance, compliance, and cloud continuity to businesses. Unitrends strives to eliminate complexity in backup solutions while also delivering products and solutions that increase uptime and productivity through the use of smart analytics, proactive support, and broad technology integration. The end result is what Unitrends describes as a “one throat to choke” set of offerings that let their customers focus on their business rather than backup.