Announcing Unitrends Hybrid Cloud: DRaaS and Recovery Assurance

“Brands are temporary fads. Functionality is forever.” [Douglas Rushkoff]

I don’t always agree with Douglas Rushkoff, but I’ve always liked this quote.  I think it’s aspirational in terms of high-technology companies.  It certainly describes where we are taking Unitrends.  Or to put this another way: recovery assurance is forever.

Which brings me to our latest Unitrends Cloud announcement.  Every day now it seems that someone offers DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) in the cloud. It’s the latest fad.  From smaller MSP vendors to behemoths like VMware and Microsoft, everyone is doing it.  So of course, Unitrends is doing the same thing, right?

Not quite.  When I noted that Unitrends would bring out a DRaaS offering in a prior blog post (What Is the Unitrends Cloud Strategy?), I noted

We offer an all-in-one cloud solution with Unitrends Cloud™.  Unitrends Cloud today offers WAN optimized and accelerated DR storage and guaranteed SLAs for physical data shipment.  Unitrends Cloud will in the near future offer DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) for physical and virtual environments.

I laid out the strategy – but I left a few major details out.  Some of the most important details, in fact.  Our marketing team did a great job with the press release which was entitled Unitrends Delivers Industry’s Only Iron-Clad Disaster Recovery Assurance to Customers.  I’ll summarize what the core differentiation of our offering is

• Hybrid.  Unitrends Cloud is a hybrid offering that supports on-premise physical and virtual appliances which have D2D2x archival storage capabilities that work on a granular level with our replication to conserve WAN bandwidth.
• Heterogeneous. Unitrends Cloud supports over 100 versions of storage, servers, operating systems, hypervisors, and applications.
• HOS and GOS spin-up.  Just as our on-premise physical and virtual appliances do, Unitrends Cloud offers HOS- and GOS-level spin-up.  This is accomplished via our Unitrends Bridge technology.
• SLA-based recovery assurance. Recovery assurance, including failback, is available.  Recovery assurance means that you’re no longer guessing whether you can meet your RPO and RTO goals – you know.  This is accomplished via our ReliableDR-as-a-service.
• White glove services.  Rather than simply protect your infrastructure by transferring it into Unitrends Cloud, we offer the industry’s best support to help you when you do testing and when there’s an emergency.

We’re excited to be able to offer this; I hope you’ll try it and let me know what you think.