It takes 30-60 days to transfer 1TB through a telephony-grade T1 circuit (WAN) depending upon the rate of compression - and that's assuming that you have 100% of that T1 available to move that 1TB. And 1TB isn't a huge amount of data these days - a SATA 7200RPM 1TB disk can be purchased for less than $90. So what do you do to get your data protected against disasters?

With many cloud-oriented backup- and replication-based solutions, all you can do is wait. The reason is that these cloud-based solutions don't offer any way to rapidly move the initial transfer of data up to the cloud.

For Vault2Cloud, this simply wasn't good enough. For that reason Unitrends offers RapidSeed. RapidSeed is simply a service that allows the backup data on an on-premise appliance to be "seeded", or copied, quickly to the cloud. This occurs by shipping the data via disk drive to the cloud itself. This process is optionally part of the entire disaster recovery lifecycle and is depicted in the diagram below.

RapidSeed is not restricted in use only during the initial phase upload of data. If a new server is brought online, or a new storage device is added, then RapidSeed may be used to rapidly synchronize your on-premise and off-premise protection.

RapidSeed is not required. If a customer decides to wait on the data to be uploaded via their WAN connection, that works as well. But for those times that you don't have weeks or months to wait on your data to be moved initially off-site so that you have a disaster recovery method in place, RapidSeed is there for you.

Cloud backup and disaster recovery at $0.25 per gigabyte

“We needed a flexible backup and disaster recovery solution that would be both easy to use and cost effective while still delivering high security and performance. The Unitrends Vault2Cloud service was exactly what we needed.  Because it was integrated into Unitrends’ D2D all-in-one solution, setup was easy and it was very affordable. I no longer have to worry about the financial impact that a disaster might have on our business. With Unitrends, we’re covered.”

-- Josh Benson, CIO, North Region Health Alliance