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Unitrends Steps Up: Page 2 of 4

What's different here? At least one analyst says it's the combination of features. "They're following the whole desire to collapse different data management functions, like archiving and backup, in one place," says Laura DuBois, research director for storage softare at IDC. While a number of mid-market systems do this, she says, few have the bare-metal restore in the same product.

EMC, for instance, offers the AX150, which scales to 6 Tbytes for SMB backup. But separate software is required to perform archiving and bare-metal restore. Likewise, HP's Virtual Library Systems (VLSs) do not perform bare-metal restores. Instead, HP relies on a tape-library application called One Button Disaster Recovery (OBDR) for that function.

Like HP and EMC, Unitrends' systems pricing starts low, at $5,000, but can range up to $100,000, depending on features. But Unitrends claims it licenses systems based on the amount of data protected, instead of on an a la carte basis.

What's not to love? Unitrends doesn't support CDP or data de-duplication. "We provide near-CDP for Exchange and SQL only," McPherson acknowledges. Later this year, the vendor plans to add "more advanced CDP capability for near real-time backup." As for data de-duplication: "It's certainly something we'd look at for vaulting," he says. Presently, de-dupe requires more hardware than Unitrends' engineers like, and they don't want to introduce performance hits in the backup process.

All that said, the new wares could help the 60-employee company get closer to what's termed small/medium enterprises (SMEs), as opposed to SMBs. Unitrends boasts about 1,000 customers today, many of which are mid-sized companies such as Fortune Industries (Indianapolis), Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative (a 29-hospital network), Whyte Hirshboeck & Dudek (a Minneapolis law firm), and the Precision Metalforming Association (based in Ohio) -- to name just a few. (See Unitrends Lands DR Partner and Unitrends Trends Toward CDP.)