Unitrends Unified Bare Metal Recovery (BMR)

[This post is one in a series concerning release 7.4 for Replication-Series physical appliances and our UEB virtual appliance.  The overview for this series may be found here.]

Unitrends Unified Bare Metal Recovery for the Recovery-Series and Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ products have always been a feature that set our company apart.  We invented BMR at Unitrends – but didn’t sit or on laurels.  We introduced Meta-Bare Metal for unified computing in release 7.3; we’re now introducing Unified Bare Metal.

Meta-Bare Metal for Unified Computing

With our patent-pending Meta-Bare Metal technology for unified architectures (which we first introduced with Cisco UCS in release 7.3) we enabled Cisco UCS administrators to back up their UCS system – not just the hardware blade or rack mount server and its operating system and applications but also we protect all configuration and profile information including network, storage, virtualization, and firmware settings unique to UCS.  This means that a UCS administrator can finally realize the full power of automated backup in a “fire and forget” mode – rather than having to manually and separately perform UCS configuration backup each day.  The customer-reported savings with respect to recovery time range from 50% to infinitely better – infinitely because of so many administrators telling us that when they had to manually perform the UCS backup they would often forget to do so after a re-configuration and thus would lose valuable configuration data that they could never recover.

Unified Bare Metal

Unitrends has always sold appliances capable of performing both bare metals and file backups – but these were two different backup types.  Our new Unified Bare Metal unifies the concepts of bare metal backups with a master (sometimes called a full) backup so that only one backup type is needed.  The advantages are enormous and include for Windows systems:

• More retention. Up to 100% more retention due to the need for only one backup type and the enhanced deduplication characteristics of that new unified bare metal/master backup type.
• Faster replication.  Replication improvements of up to 100% due to the enhanced deduplication characteristics of the new unified bare metal/master backup type.
• Smaller backup window.  When bare metals are scheduled with master backups, the backup window is reduced by up to 100% due to the elimination of the separate bare metal backup.
• Faster RTO.  With Unified Bare Metal there is no longer the need to restore the bare metal and then restore the file-based backup.  This means that RTO is improved by as much as 100%.
• Universal BMR.  A single ISO is used for all bare metal restores which means that only one restore media must be created.  This reduces bare metal restore preparation time by on average between 50% to as much as 200% or more.
• Different sized BMR source and targets.  A feature customers have asked for is to allow bare metal backups to be restored to different sized targets; this is now available with Unified Bare Metal.
• GPT and EFI/UEFI support.  GPT and EFI/UEFI bare metal support is now available.
• Simpler.  A new user interface for bare metals radically simplifies the backup and restore process.

In addition, we’ve included hot bare metal support for GPT-based Linux systems as well.

Thus for our many customers that use our bare metal capabilities either within the physical environment or within the GOS (Guest Operating System) in a virtual infrastructure, the benefits are incredible.