(Part 2 – RESTful API) Recovery Series and Unitrends Enterprise Backup 9.0

Unitrends Backup 9.0 brings Out-of-the-Box Automation Support

By now you have probably picked up on how proud we are of release 9.0 and our beautiful new Satori User interface.  Now it is well known that one of the key ways to make a user interface easy-to-use is to keep the number of options to a minimum.  So it would not be surprising for you to know that our User Experience designers were very adamant about keeping options out of the user interface and had some pretty epic battles with our developers who wanted to put more options in to the user interface.

Well, the happy solution that kept our designers and developers going home as friends at night turns out to be a tremendous win for those of us who prefer to write scripts and hardly ever look at the user interface at all!   The Unitrends Backup 9.0 release is built upon a set of RESTful APIs that can be accessed from a Command Line Interface and from any number of popular scripting languages.

While the CLI option will keep the Linux sysadmins happy, we also wanted to show some love to the Windows sysadmins!  So today we are introducing a community driven project hosted in github to provide Powershell cmdlets to automate common operations for Unitrends backup 9.0 systems.   We are introducing the community with a few “seed” cmdlets to start with and we want to hear from you what other tasks you would find helpful for automation or customization purposes.  You can also contribute to the project and commit your own cmdlets or automation scripts to be used by others.

What are the most important Use Cases for Automation?

Some use cases we think would be good automation candidates for Powershell cmdlets are:

• Starting an on-demand backup job of a laptop whenever it is connected to the company network.  This is a great backup solution for travelling employees since scheduled backups can’t be guaranteed to run when they are connected.
• Event-driven backups, such as starting a file-level backup of a server when a database export has completed.
• Creating customized reports from one or more Unitrends Backup appliances.
• Automating restores of servers for data analysis purposes.

But what do you think?  Comment on this thread or in the github community to let us know what types of automation scripts you would like to see!

How do I get started?

You can find instructions on how to download and install the project here.   You can also find documentation on the Unitrends API here.   Information on the Unitrends CLI can be found here.