Unitrends Adds Linux Hot Snapshotting To Appliance-Based Rapid Recovery - page 2

Rapid Recovery No Longer a Luxury

Unitrends' appliance disk snapshot based approach is the latest of recent changes in the backup/restoral market, reflecting the intersection of companies' need to have key applications back online as quickly as possible--minutes rather than hours--and the use of disk-to-disk (D2D) for primary backup in place of disk-to-tape (D2T), and broadband enabling centralized backups from remote sites, and e-vaulting from central sites to off-site.

Combining hardware and backup software isn't necessarily hard, but, says Taneja, "The smaller the company, the more they don't want headaches --'Don't send me the CD, we don't want our IT people spending time installing and configuring, we're rather spend a little more on the purchase.'

"Even if it's a relatively simple integration task, don't underestimate the market's desire for packaged solutions," Taneja states. "Especially in smaller companies, 50 to 100 people and up, IT people aren't experts in everything, appliances help. Unitrends has made it possible to recover not only the data image, but also the entire system, so a company can recover in a single step."

Also, Taneja notes, "Unitrends can do recovery on dissimilar hardware. Most vendors can only do recovery on the same type of platform, e.g. 'a dual-Xeon with 1GB of RAM.' It may not be possible to get similar hardware, if the failed system was three years old--and you may not want to get an exact replacement." While Unitrends won't let an x86 image be restored to a SPARC machine, he concedes, "You can move from a 1-way Xeon to a 4-way, et cetera. So you don't have to keep spares of everything, and have more time to recover sensibly."

The big challenge, says Taneja, will "educating the market as to what bare metal restore is.

"The way that the industry has done data protection over the past twenty years has been archaic," comments Taneja.

Daniel P. Dern is a freelance technology writer covering Linux/Open Source, security, WiFi/VoIP/WiMAX, SOHO/mobility and other topics. His web site is www.dern.com.