Backup, Archiving, Instant Recovery, and Replication: What’s New in Release 6.3? [Part 3]

We’ve spoken at length about Unitrends Enterprise Backup™; what we haven’t talked about is what powers it – release 6.3 for both our Recovery-series of appliances and our software-only solution. Release 6.3 was shipped in June. It’s a huge release – so huge that we wondered whether we should call it release 7 – however, release 7 will come out in September, and it has even more features/functions – so we stayed with our naming conventions.

Here’s the third part (part 1 is here and part 2 is here) of a series on what’s new in release 6.3. In this part, we’ll talk about the new features exclusively offered for Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ and the Recovery-series of physical appliances.

New Unitrends Release 6.3 features that operate on the Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ software-only
virtual appliance platform for Hyper-V and VMware include:

• Smaller footprint. Unlike other data protection products, Unitrends all-in-one virtual appliances handles the details of storage administration. The minimum amount of metadata necessary to support a terabyte of raw backup space has been significantly reduced to a mere 27GB. Note that this will grow as more data is protected and/or more metadata is needed; an example is document management systems with millions of files per terabyte that will require more than this minimum.
• Smaller download size. The download size has been reduced from approximately 1.4GB to approximately 1GB for both the Hyper-V and VMware virtual appliances.
• Checksum-based download process. A new checksum-based download process is offered for all editions of Unitrends Enterprise Backup™.
• Support for tape archiving under VMware. Support for tape archiving (D2D2T, or Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape), which is a key feature on our Recovery-series of physical appliances, is now available for our VMware-based Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ product. (Note: This feature is not available on Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V role or Hyper-V server at this time due to a lack of interface information being available in the Hyper-V hypervisor.)
• Storage virtualization. Storage virtualization is provided via an advanced LVM (Logical Volume Management) implementation that provides higher performance across multiple physical spindles and simpler management through backup and associated metadata being managed as a single primary pool of backup storage.
•  Thin provisioning. Thin provisioning is provided via the storage virtualization capabilities such that new backup (and associated metadata) space can be dynamically added and collated into the primary backup pool.
• Global deduplication. Global deduplication across multiple physical devices is available on Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ through an advanced storage virtualization implementation.
• Interoperability with third-party deduplication devices. Either using the setup wizard or via the “Settings” configuration system in the user interface interoperability with third-party deduplication devices as the core backup target is now 1-click simple. Third-party deduplication devices typically offer even better deduplication performance and data reduction ratios.
• Licensing. Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ offers a Free Edition, a Trial Edition for evaluation of all features for purchase, an NFR (Not For Resale) time-limited edition designed for certified Microsoft and VMware professionals, and an Enterprise Edition with both resource-based licensing as well as protected capacity licensing. Resource-based licensing is available on per-socket, per-physical server, and per-server application level.

New Unitrends Release 6.3 features that operate on the physical Recovery-series appliances
include:

• RJ45 10Gb Ethernet adapter support. Support for the RJ45 10Gb Ethernet adapter is provided on those Recovery-series platforms that support 10Gb Ethernet adapters. For more information, please see the Recovery-series data sheets.

And that’s about it. Whew! Made me tired just calling out all the new functions. And as always, our existing customers with a support contract get all this functionality at no additional cost.

Are we missing some feature you think we should have? Let us know.