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Dell and Unitrends both bulk up their backup

Extra options should you suffer a ROBO apocalypse

There’s feverish development in the SME backup market as Dell and Unitrends follow NAKIVO in fortifying their product offerings.

Dell has added stuff to its SME AppAssure backup products with a new SW version and a new appliance, the DL1000. It’s also added the DR2000v to its deduplicating backup appliance range.

The latest version 5.4.2 of AppAssure software adds:

  • Cloud provider accounts - an account management interface so accounts can be added and managed for each cloud provider, including the user’s own cloud.
  • New cloud storage targets; Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and OpenStack-based platforms and the ability to import cloud archives back into AppAssure repositories.
  • Create recurring scheduled archives on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, as well as the option to update existing archives with incremental changes.
  • Support for Hyper-V Generation 2 Virtual Machines and VMware VM Hardware version 10.
  • FIPS 140-2 Certification, meaning US government-certified encryption.

The turnkey DL1000 is AppAssure running on a 1U Dell PowerEdge R220 server and features:

  • 2 or 3TB usable capacity, and the 3TB version can be ordered with two licensed Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines.
  • Snapshotting up to once an hour with changed data tracking and de-duplication,
  • The AppAssure cloud connector to use Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, RackSpace, and OpenStack-based platforms as targets,

It’s for small environments, either on premises or for cloud services providers.

With the DL1000 and any server running AppAssure now being a backup cloud storage gateway, won't this encourage existing cloud storage gateway suppliers to think about adding backup to their feature set?

Dell also has the DR2000v - a software-based deduplication appliance for use in remote office and branch office (ROBO) environments, and it runs as an ESXi or Hyper-V virtual machine, backing up to and recovering data from a central office. Supported backup applications include Dell’s NetVault Backup and vRanger products.

All of Dell’s DR series appliances - think DR4000, DR4100 and DR6000 - get cascaded replication and replication seeding. Cascaded replication means replicating to a third site for more disaster recovery coverage and replication seeding speeds up disaster recovery site establishment.

The DL1000, DR2000v, and AppAssure 5.4.2 are available now from Dell or its channel. The DL1000 starts at $4,800 for 2TB, $6,500 for 3TB and $8,800 for 3TB plus 2 Hyper-V VM licenses. The DR2000v starts at $4,200 for 1TB, $7,500 for 2TB, and $13,500 for 4TB.

Unitrends

We know about Veeam and NAKIVO - but here’s another SME virtualised server backup company that’s growing fast; Unitrends (Feb’ 2013 review here). The company claims it’s “the industry’s fastest-growing multi-environment data protection and disaster recovery company,” and boasts of a world-wide customer count approaching 12,000.

It ships virtual appliances providing hypervisor-level protection for VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, with physical, virtual and cloud-based protection and recovery. and has revved its Unitrends Virtual Backup (UVB) software to v8.0.

This was previously known as PHD Virtual Backup and has enhancements to boost ease-of-use and the performance of backup, archiving and replication. It has a new Web-based single pane-of-glass dashboard GUI, and algorithms, based on industry best practices, to optimise backup and recovery process steps. Unitrends says this ranges from speeding installation through daily backup management to full site recovery.

There’s a free edition of UVB and the paid-for v8.0 outperforms it 50x on backup speed, so, freeloaders, dig into your wallets.

UVB Professional edition with 24 x 7 Platinum support is £497.00/socket. UVB Enterprise adds in centralised management across multiple environments plus Exchange and Sharepoint item level recovery. With Platinum support it’s £672.00/socket. ®

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