What is Unitrends “Gen 8” and Why Should Backup Users Care?

While those of us who have been IT users for years have become jaded to repeated announcements of “new” hardware, Unitrends’ newest products contain features that can significantly reduce the amount of time spent performing repetitive tasks. Faster disks, larger capacities, higher densities are integrated into new product offerings all the time. Unitrends’ next generation of hardware includes all that, but this announcement is part of an on-going movement by Unitrends to make backing up enterprise environments simpler and less time consuming.

The latest offerings of Unitrends Recovery Series, labeled Gen 8 (we have had so many upgrades over our 20+ years of being in the backup and recovery market we need to number them to keep everyone straight) has multiple important features:

  • Better fit – we have more models than any other appliance vendor which allows for the best fit to a customer’s environment.
  • More resilience – We are the first to use 12 TB drives, which is not only cool, but reduces the number of parts that can fail – and we’ve even included new self-healing technologies that greatly reduce the number of support cases related to drive failures – literally a 90% reduction.
  • Easier to buy – we didn’t change the name just for the sake of changing the name – we now name our appliances based on how people buy them … based on the size of capacity.

But the most important difference is that this refresh includes a new version of the integrated backup software – 10.2. Not only does this new OS enable the faster performance of the hardware, it includes several new features that address the continuing evolution of Unitrends focus on enterprises and improving the efficiency of backing up large environments. These include:

  • Unitrends is now “Nutanix Ready”. Hyperconverged platforms are a rapidly expanding presence in the market as enterprises seek to reduce their cost from using name-brand hypervisors and separately managing compute, storage and networking devices. Unitrends and Nutanix have integrated hypervisor-level support for Nutanix AHV to reduce enterprise infrastructure costs as well as extend backup and continuity to secondary, remote Nutanix nodes or the Unitrends Cloud. Now Nutanix users can have enterprise-quality protection with no compromises.
  • In 10.2, several new enhancements have made the UI faster at scale and significantly reduce the time to perform repetitive tasks, especially for large environments. A lot of this functionality is backed by the inclusion of row virtualization technology in several areas of the interface.  Users now can quickly customize the data they want to see, with the power to act on it quickly and efficiently.  Additionally, a brand new Backup Browser feature drastically simplifies search and management against a large number of backups.
  • New, innovative self-healing disks in Unitrends Gen 8 appliances continuously monitor and correct most sources of RAID level failures. If necessary, the appliance will proactively notify the customer of pending failures and open Support tickets.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also built into the Recovery Series appliances that will automatically detect and incorporate replacement drives into the RAID array without human intervention.

Perhaps the best feature of Gen 8 is not really a feature but an added inducement. Unitrends now offers 6 months of free cloud storage with the purchase of a Unitrends appliance and 3 or 5 years of Unitrends Cloud service.

Unitrends is committed to making backup easier, even for the most complex IT environments. There are more details and proof points in our new program Spend less Time on DR and More Time on IT. By spending less time managing enterprise backups you have more time to spend on yourself. Read the report and see how much time you can save by using the newest backup features.

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