Unitrends Enhances Rapid Recovery Backup Platform

After 18 months of rewriting its code, Unitrends Corp. this week unveiled version 4.0 of its Rapid Recovery backup product with a new management console, a batch of customized reports, valued fire verification, and support for more than 40 operating systems and applications.

In a pitch to the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market, Unitrends says it has reduced complexity and is offering a simplified "wizard" approach to disaster recovery and business continuity in its line of backup appliances. "We have a new user interface that makes it easy to configure and set up backup schedules and to recover data," Unitrends CEO Duncan McPherson tells Byte and Switch. "The system also makes it easy to test disaster recovery plans and prove that files that are going to the data vault are arriving complete and uncorrupted, which is required in some industries for audit purposes."

A year and a half ago, the company added multiple-drive units and a Web-based monitoring tool to its basic backup box. Now it is adding a Rapid Recovery Console to let users centrally control backup and generate customizable reports that can be saved in XML or CSV formats for importing into reporting tools like CrystalReports or Excel. The system can also take snapshots of files and folders or full images for a bare-metal recovery of an entire server, McPherson says.

The company now supports a wide range of operating systems and applications, including Windows, Linux, Novell Netware, Exchange, Sun Solaris, Mac OS, VMware, AIX, MS-SQL, UnixWare, HP-UX, FreeBSD, and others. It can backup virtual servers and provides data de-duplication capabilities in the backup process.

"We like to call it the iPod of data protection because it is that simple and easy to use," McPherson says. "Just tell us how much you want to back up and how long you want to keep it and we will configure it and guarantee that it will work."McPherson is trying to pitch his product as an inexpensive alternative to systems offered by high-end vendors like EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC). A small desktop version of a data protection unit with the 4.0 software starts at less than $5,000, and a typical configuration runs around $15,000, he says. Customers with a current software maintenance agreement get the new software for free.

Analyst Arun Taneja, founder of Taneja Group, said in a statement that ease of use and simplified management is important to many businesses because "it can mean the difference between a fast, seamless recovery from a system loss or failure or true disaster." He said the new Unitrends product does a good job of providing customers "with all the data protection and recovery functionality and management capabilities they require in a complete and integrated solution."