Unitrends Adds Cloud-Based Storage to Backup Offering

March 23, 2010 Alex Woodie

Unitrends, a provider of backup and recovery appliances for i/OS and other platforms, last week announced the launch of Vault2Cloud, a new cloud-based storage service that gives customers another layer of data protection and disaster preparedness. With prices starting at less than $.50 per gigabyte, the new offering could be a low-cost way for existing customers to insulate themselves from the effects of a disaster.

Unitrends has quietly amassed an impressive installed base of more than 1,500 customers with its line of Data Protection Vaults and Cross Vaults, which are purpose-built backup/recovery and archive appliances built on a standard X64 platform and outfitted with cheap SATA disks. Hooked up to agents that deploy to i/OS, Windows, Unix, or Linux servers, these appliances help to simplify backup/recovery and archive workloads, which otherwise might be complicated with multiple backup utilities and backup media.

For some time, Unitrends helped to replicate its customers’ multi-platform data among multiple, geographically dispersed appliances over the network, thereby providing an element of disaster recovery (DR) protection. However, this form of “private vaulting” required customers to purchase two or more appliances.

Now, with the launch of the new Vault2Cloud service, Unitrends is providing another option for DR, and eliminating the need for customers to buy two or more appliances to get that good (geographically dispersed) DR protection.

Vault2Cloud is a multi-tenant application that runs in an unidentified SAS 70-certified data center. Customers periodically upload their changed data to the cloud over encrypted network connections, and manage their vaulted data from the same Web-based interface they use to manage their on-premise Unitrends appliances.

Unitrends also introduced the “RapidSeed” program to handle the prickly matter of that initial data load. With RapidSeed, users copy their data to a disk drive, and then ship the physical drive to Unitrends. Incremental backups are then sent over the line.

The RapidSeed option eliminates the long load times that customers would face by performing initial data loads over the Internet. According to Unitrends, it takes 30 to 60 days to transfer 1 TB of compressed data over a T1 line. With disk so cheap these days, the network approach just doesn’t make any sense–unless one’s shop is located very close to an Internet Exchange point.

Pricing for Vault2Cloud starts at $.49 per GB. For more information, see www.unitrends.com.