This covers a summary of Unitrends Cloud Backup and Recovery product set (currently version 9) in a single post.
What is Unitrends On-Premise and Hybrid Cloud Backup?
Unitrends have a fantastic all in one product set specialising in backup and business continuity.
They provide a radically simple cloud-empowered all in one connected continuity platform to increase IT confidence.
Unitrends portfolio of products keep things as simple as possible, empowering your data, your information and your business to remain as connected as possible so you can be confident in your recovery across virtual, physical and cloud backup solutions.
How much data do they protect?
Unitrends currently protects up to 1EB of customer data worldwide with headquarters in Boston and South Carolina, USA.
European headquarters in London. Global Datacentre Presence is in USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Australia for hosting cloud offerings.
What problems do we face with data /cloud backup and recovery for the future?
In future trends of growth, IT professionals face data and server avalanche across virtual and physical environments.
This means that files data and servers are growing rapidly, double digit liner growth is expected over the next 10 years and increasing at an alarming rate, but IT professionals are not.
You can image that this rapid increase in files data storage, each admin will be responsible for more and more data at any given location.
We are going to need tools to backup more, recover more, and be able to do more with less time during this data growth.
Overall, confidence that IT professionals have is plunging. It’s getting more difficult to recover quickly and, if businesses can`t recover in a certain amount of time to meet RTO metrics (recovery time objectives) then this can cause disaster for any business.
So where do we solve this problem?
The whole goal here is to provide an all in one solution, providing total confidence in backing up and restoring everything you have from a single file to a full site in the cloud.
Unitrends product set comes in the following, all accessible from a secure web page using a simple single pane of glass.
Data protection platform:
Two flavours of Unitrends Backup come in two forms, a Virtual Appliance and Physical.
- Unitrends Backup – (Virtual appliance). Can be deployed quickly as a Virtual Machine running on VMware, Microsoft HyperV, Linux or Citrix XenServer. Backup up data and applications to existing hypervisor storage SAN/NAS attached to the Virtual Machine.
- Recovery-Series – (Physical unit). Available in 14 different models, ranging from 1TB to 182TB (raw) storage. Hardware is available with tiered SSD flash storage. This includes disk, CPU (2 to 16 CPU cores), 8GB to 256GB memory and networking 1GB to 10GB SFP+.
Both platforms above can backup/recover:
- File granular / Operating System OS level, Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS etc. (protects over 100 operating systems!)
- Virtual Machine running on VMware, HyperV, Xen
- Application Level – Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Oracle
Using:
- Deduplication
- Encryption (AES 256)
- WAN Optimisation
- Compression (LZ4)
Licensing:
Price is per hypervisor socket or physical server. Includes 24 X 7 support:
- Unitrends Free – Free Protection for 1TB of data, Virtual servers only
- Essentials – Protection for up to 10 Servers Physical and Virtual
- Standard – Production for any size environment, Virtual and Physical, Citrix Xenserver protection, NAS, second site backup copies (WAN optimised)
- Enterprise – Application level backups– Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Oracle
- Enterprise Plus – All the above plus ReliableDR, automation testing/failover, reporting RTO/RTO
Disaster Recovery Platform:
- Unitrends Forever Cloud (Archive) – Allows data to archived and replicated to the cloud for cloud backup. Gets data off on premise. Keeps 7 days, 4 weekly, 12 monthly and then infinite yearly’s.
Unitrends can send you the data in a disaster, or you can recover by building another appliance and importing the data (cloud backups) from the cloud.
- Unitrends Forever Cloud (Disaster Recovery as a Service) – Maybe that’s not enough, as part of your business continuity you might want full DRaaS of servers in the cloud.
If you have a very small RTO window and need to be online in a short period of time then that’s where DRaaS as a service comes into play.
It gives you the ability to choose Virtual environment VMware, Hyper-V Virtual Machines together with physical to be spun up in Unitrends cloud in 1 hour SLA (Service Level Agreement).
Recovery Assurance from Unitrends can provide automated testing of recovery so you can be assured of recovery and long this will take. Testing can be carried out in an isolated network to confident that you can recover.
Testing the recovery ensures that the SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) and RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) are reported correctly for compliance.
The Unitrends entire portfolio ranges from protecting a single file, all the way up to making sure you can bring back and failover your entire business in the cloud.
- Unitrends Third Party Cloud Backup (Hot Target) – Allows data to archived and replicated to storage in the cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google and Rackspace.
- Unitrends Appliance (Hot Target) – Allows backup copies to archived and replicated, for example to another Unitrends appliance, virtual or physical. Unitrends appliance can be in another site for Disaster Recovery. Then from there you can copy that data to local media.
- Unitrends Archive (Cold Target) – Allows data to archived and replicated to CIFS, NAS, SAN, iSCSI and tape.
- Unitrends Reliable DR (Windows OS and Reliable DR App installed in the recovery site) – Orchestrates disaster recovery (failover and failback) of Virtual Machines to meet SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) and RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives). This is carried out by replication of VMs from hypervisor (VMware or HyperV) in a Primary site to another hypervisor in the recovery site, or replication of backups from the Unitrends Virtual Appliance to recover and automate VMs on the hypervisor on the recovery site. Planned migration and change of IP address within Virtual Machine when powered up on recovery site are also possible.
Virtual Machine tests and reports can then be generated in an isolated network to prove DR compliance.
- Unitrends Boomerang (Virtual appliance) – Allows simple replication and migration of VMWare Virtual Machines to the Amazon or Azure Cloud and back again (failover and failback) achieving low RTO.
Recovery Options
- File Level recovery, either two methods are supported
- Restore files by selecting them at a granular level, then restoring in a tradional way.
- Create a file recovery object – This instantly mounts the server backup and creates a CIFS share path to enable instant access to the files over the network.
- Virtual Machine, either two methods are supported
VM Instant Recovery – Virtual Machine can be instantly powered on from a backup in both live (production) and audit (test) mode.
In audit mode, this mounts the appliance datastore by using NFS from the Unitrends appliance to VMware host and then adds the VM to the inventory in vCenter.
VM then powers up from that data store containing the VMDKs. The Instantly Recovered VM runs from the hypervisors memory and CPU, while the VM disks are present on the Unitrends appliance
In live mode, VMware Storage vMotion would migrates VMDKs from Unitrends appliance to the production VMware datastore on the hypervisor.
- Windows Instant Recovery (bare metal recovery to any hardware type)
- This allows the recovery of backups onto different physical hardware from where the backup was taken from.
- Application Level – Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Oracle
- Recovery can be achieved at the application level.
