Backup, Archiving, Instant Recovery, and Replication: What’s New in Release 6.3? [Part 1]

We’ve spoken at length about Unitrends Enterprise Backup(TM); 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 will be shipped later this month (June, 2012.) It’s a huge release – so huge that we wondered whether we should call it release 7 – however, release 7 is in September and it has even more features/functions – so we stayed with our naming conventions.

Here’s the first part of a series on what’s new in release 6.3.

Release 6.3 Core Features

New Unitrends Release 6.3 core features that operate on both the software-only Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ Hyper-V and VMware virtual appliances and the physical Recovery-series appliances include:

• Simpler deployment and setup via our scale-down technology. A significant change in Release 6.3 is a completely re-imagined and re-engineered setup process and setup wizard that supports all Unitrends products. This is designed to accelerate the TtV (Time-to-Value) so that the user can quickly go from downloading our software product or racking our physical product to begin protecting various clients in five minutes or less.
• Visual client operating system representation. Because we support so many different types of operating systems as well as hypervisors and applications, we now provide better iconic representation of each of these at all points in the system.
• Single server backup. Backup is now available not only in a multiple server backup single screen, but also in a single server backup screen. Single server backup is simpler; multiple server backup allows the creation of single schedule (or job) backups consisting of up to thousands of servers. No wizards are necessary for either multiple server backup or single server backup. Bare Metal, full/full, full/differential, full/incremental, incremental forever, and custom strategies are available from both the single and multiple server backup screens.
• Navigation simplification. Prior versions of the user interface had a relatively restrictive navigation paradigm; this has been replaced by a smarter navigation scheme that predicts what the user means where possible and asks the user what to do otherwise.
• NAS and unified storage protection simplification. Agentless and serverless NAS protection has been simplified via the ability to create backup strategies around mount points.
• User interface environmental adaptation. The user interface detects what exists in the user’s environment and chooses a display strategy designed to simplify the user experience without interfering with the features available to the user.
• Customer/location configurable autohide. Larger deployments use customers and locations to track systems; however, smaller deployments tend to ignore customer/location information. This has been made configurable in this release.

Part 2 will continue this list of new features.