Sustainability, Density, Affordability, and Failover Virtualization – Unitrends Recovery-943: The Soul of a New Backup Appliance (Part 8)
Unitrends recently introduced the Unitrends Recovery-943. This appliance is the next generation flagship of the Unitrends Recovery-series of backup appliances. We began this series of blog posts by discussing why backup appliances are experiencing such rapid demand and adoption, and continued the discussion by addressing the challenges facing enterprise-class data protection backup appliance vendors. The following blog post explored the Recovery-943 architecture and the most recent blog post addressed the specific responses that the designers of the Recovery-943 had to each of the challenges discussed.
Ecological Sustainability and Density: 40 Drives in only 4Us
The Recovery-943 has unparalleled compute and storage density that in turn lowers the U-based footprint within the data center and delivers far more capabilities per U than any other backup appliance.
One way to measure the ecological sustainability of a backup appliance is to determine the maximum backup that may be used for data protection per watt per U of rack space. Note that this is a worst-case measure and does not take into account fault tolerance – and fault tolerance tends to lower the ecological sustainability because drives are used for parity. This also doesn’t take into account the impact of deduplication on increasing retention.
Nevertheless, the Recovery-943 offers a maximum backup size of 50TB with a maximum AC power consumption is 1400W over 4U’s of rack space for 142GB per watt. Compare that with a Recovery-833 that offers a maximum backup size of 20TB with a maximum AC power consumption of 760W over 3U’s of rack space for a rating of approximately 9GB per watt. The Recovery-943 thus yields more than 15X more backup space per watt per U of rack space.
Affordability: Price per Terabyte and Deduplication
The Recovery-943 is an enterprise-class machine priced for the midrange enterprise market. The storage architecture, which enables the use of affordable and yet high-performance rotational drives as the core vehicle to retain the raw backup data, is key to enabling this affordability. As a result, the Recovery-943 has the lowest price per terabyte in the industry.
One factor that significantly and at times dramatically impacts the price per terabyte is the byte-level content-aware deduplication that Unitrends offers. The effectiveness of deduplication and thus its impact on the overall data reduction rate is directly correlated to the amount of retention present on a system.
The Recovery-943 has a maximum backup size of 50TB. However, the rate of deduplication will be maximized not when the maximum backup size is reached but instead when the unit is used for smaller backup sizes which require longer retention periods.
Virtualization: Failover Virtualization
The 32 processor threads, 256GB of memory, and optimized storage architecture are critical in enabling the use of instant recovery for both on-appliance failover virtualization for Windows and off-appliance failover virtualization for VMware.
It must be noted that there is not a simple correlation between the amount of raw backup space and the processor and memory available for not only backup, archiving, and disaster recovery but large numbers of clients protected with instant recovery (failover virtualization) as well. For IT infrastructure that has less data but more clients for which an RTO of minutes is required, it is recommended that multiple smaller Recover-series backup appliances be used rather than a single Recovery-943. This recommendation is qualified by other aspects of the IT infrastructure and the specifics of the data protection environment; consult your Unitrends sales representative and pre-sales engineer for a full discussion and analysis of this situation.
