Extending Simplicity: Unitrends 9.1 Recovery Software

Over the last decade the job of IT managers has gotten much more complex while resources have been reduced, so everyone is doing more with less. Meanwhile the job of data backup and recovery has increased in importance as new threats, such as ransomware have emerged. To counter both these trends, Unitrends has been working to make business continuity faster, simpler and easier for IT managers.

A large part of the Unitrends strategy is to make the user interface (UI) easy to understand and our products simple to operate. We focus on concepts such as click counts, reports that are easy to interpret, and intuitive interfaces. The focus of our recovery software 9.0 release last year was simplicity, with improved features including a new user interface, a REST-based API, integration with Unitrends Cloud and support of Citrix XEN Server.

Unitrends will soon be announcing the release of 9.1 of our software for Recovery Series physical appliances and Unitrends Enterprise Backup software. This release will be one of the largest in Unitrends history with over 300 enhancements in addition to being a cumulative update for all patches to 9.0. The 9.1 release continues the simplicity theme with the addition of usability enhancements, many of which were requested by our customer base.

There are many new features in 9.1 but here are a few that almost everyone can use to make life faster and easier when it comes to backup and recovery:

• The Edit dialog for virtual machines has received a new option that allows you to easily select which quiesce method you want to apply to that individual VM. With 9.1 you will be able to choose from three Quiesce methods which are crash consistent, application consistent and application aware.

• Rather than having to apply settings and commands to individual servers one at a time, you can now group assets together within the inventory tree menu and apply settings and rules on all at the same time. For example you can select, by checking, all databases / VMs within Create Backup Job. This accomplishes more work with fewer keystrokes and ensures consistency across your backup jobs.

• 9.1 will support simplified recovery of SQL servers with multiple databases. Rather than recovering databases sequentially, with 9.1 you will be now be able to do a concurrent recovery of multiple databases.

• Unitrends understands that in the real world there are many organizations that still rely on tape units for long term archiving. 9.1 will support tape and autoloader configurations and advanced reporting in the UI.

We encourage users of all Unitrends products to be running the latest and greatest version of the recovery software. 9.1 includes many user enhancements, but you can only get them if you upgrade. All future shipments of Recovery Series and Unitrends Enterprise Backup Software will ship with this version once it has been released.

The software, as well as the technical support for installation is free to those with current support contracts. Please contact your Unitrends supplier or visit Unitrends  if you have any questions.