All in the Family

2014 is finally here, and I’m sure you all, like myself, are working on keeping New Year’s resolutions. Things like improving your physical health, mental health, financial health, fitness, career… I’ve made them all at some point along the way as well. Unitrends is starting off this new year running full stride with our new family member, PHD Virtual. They have an awesome software product line which includes HOS backup for Hyper-V, VMware and XenServer. As a matter of fact, they (now we 🙂 ) are one of the only solutions to offer to offer host-level snapshot backups for XenServer. But in addition to traditional backup for virtual environments, they also have other products in their portfolio which compliment Unitrends product set nicely. They have a Recovery Management Suite (RMS) and also a Reliable DR product which helps assure business continuity by automating the disaster recovery process to reduce the cost and complexity of failover, failback and testing. With RDR, admins can certify their VMs will recover in the event of a disaster as planned, and within corresponding SLAs. This feature also includes application testing at the DR site.

So… why am I bragging about our new family member? Because they are offering, for a limited time, a completely free version of their backup product for Hyper-V. Version 7 is a fully functioning backup product for Hyper-V 2012 and 2012 R2. It provides the ability to schedule backups, including incremental forever. There are no limits on the number of VMs or sockets your are allowed to backup with their (our) free version.

Now you know I’ve always been a big proponent of Unitrends Enterprise Backup, but if you are running or building a Hyper-V 2012 shop and don’t yet have budget for HOS backup software, I strongly recommend you give them a try.