You made the business decision to pursue virtualization because you knew it would dramatically reduce your hardware costs and it would radically decrease your utility bills. You also saw it as a way to pursue higher availability at a much lower cost when compared to traditional clustering. You knew there was no magic - that the only way to handle an ever escalating regulatory environment was real physical data protection.

However, what you may not have counted on was the complexity that arose from virtualization. New administrative skills, different virtualization vendors, different versions of virtualization platforms with different licensing policies, mixed physical and virtual environments, a plethora of virtual machine images, and SAN vendors attempting to capitalize on the advantages of virtualization to achieve lock-in so that they can achieve higher margins for storage now and in the future - these are just a few of the challenges you face.

Unitrends Solution

The value that Unitrends brings to businesses that have deployed or are considering deploying virtualization is as follows:

• Unified monitoring and management: Our Rapid Recovery Console allows unified monitoring and management; our alert, SMTP e-mail, and SNMP systems allow integration with third-party systems and network management platforms.
• Edge data protection: Protection of notebooks, PCs, and workstations at the "edge" of the IT infrastructure. Local storage is protected without requiring people to remember to copy to the SAN.
• Physical and virtual server protection: Protection of physical and virtual servers within the IT infrastructure. This may be used to avoid proprietary vendor lock-in of a single storage vendor or technology.
• NAS data protection: Protection of NASs within the IT infrastructure. This may be used to avoid proprietary vendor lock-in of a single storage vendor or technology. You can protect your NAS either directly or indirectly.
• SAN D2D tape replacement: Disk-to-disk tape replacement offers the lower total cost of ownership and reliability achieved when replacing tape media. SAN snapshots on a frequent basis may be used with less frequent D2D snapshots to protect data from SAN failure or from failure types infrequently detected
• D2D2D rotational archiving: Disk-to-disk-to-disk rotational archiving may be used for disaster recovery and to conserve WAN bandwidth in a multi-premise environment.
• D2D2T rotational archiving: Disk-to-disk-to-tape rotational archiving may be used for disaster recovery and to conserve WAN bandwidth in a multi-premise environment in a situation in which tapes are required by convention.
• Electronic vaulting: Electronic vaulting offers the lowest total cost of ownership in terms of disaster recovery and tends to conserve WAN bandwidth better than SAN-based replication. If sufficient WAN bandwidth exists, SAN-based replication is a viable alternative to electronic vaulting.

Typically our customers fall into three classes with respect to virtualization. Most have either deployed virtualization within their production IT environment or they are at an early stage of deploying virtualization in limited cases. However, we have a few customers who have committed to (but not yet achieved) 100% server virtualization. Unitrends primary value propositions of our appliances in these environments are as follows:

Early Virtualization

Virtualization is being deployed in a proof-of-concept approach to decrease costs for targeted servers, operating systems, and applications.

Unitrends offers:

• Unified monitoring and management
• Edge data protection
• Server and NAS data protection
• SAN D2D tape replacement
• D2D2D rotational archiving
• D2D2T rotational archiving
• Electronic vaulting

Deployed Virtualization

Virtualization has been deployed and is in operation to decrease costs for targeted operating servers, operating systems, and applications.

Unitrends offers:

• Unified monitoring and management
• Edge data protection
• Server and NAS data protection
• SAN D2D tape replacement
• D2D2D rotational archiving
• D2D2T rotational archiving
• Electronic vaulting†

100% Virtualization

Virtualization has been completely deployed and has replaced all other computer and storage options.

Unitrends offers:

• Unified monitoring and management
• Edge data protection
• Virtual server data protection
• SAN D2D tape replacement
• D2D2D rotational archiving
• D2D2T rotational archiving
• Electronic vaulting†