Unitrends Trends Toward CDP

Unitrends is banking that near is far enough when it comes to delivering continuous data protection (CDP) to the SMB crowd it targets with its appliances.

Early next year, Unitrends will add an application it calls continuous system protection (CSP) to its appliances to help customers restore their systems faster and with less data loss than previously. The application will run on Unitrends Data Protection Units (DPUs) for local backup and Data Protection Vaults (DPVs) for off-site vaulting.

CSP doesnt continuously save data for "any point in time recovery" like true CDP, but instead allows customers to take snapshots at a selected interval -- hourly, daily, or weekly, for instance. CSP can restore individual files or whole applications, such as Exchange, Oracle, or SQL Server.

CSP installs as an agent on protected servers and stores snapshots of files, applications, and operating systems on Unitrends' DPU hardware. For disaster recovery, the snapshots can also be written over the WAN to a remote DPV. If a server fails, Unitrends claims it can restore the operating system, applications, and data within 30 minutes locally and within hours from a remote vault.

At least one customer has confidence in the proposed product. “We know that at some point, one or more of our systems will fail,” says Kevin Hughes, business manager at Sharonview Federal Credit Union in Charlotte, N.C. “Unitrends assures us the information we need will be available within minutes.”