Unitrends to Add Deduplication to D2D Backup Appliances

May 4, 2010 Alex Woodie

An upcoming release of Unitrends disk-to-disk (D2D) backup appliances will feature new data deduplication technologies that should allow customers to cram more data into each device. Unitrends, which offers support for i/OS with backup appliances, says the “adaptive” deduplication technology in its upcoming Release 5 eliminates much of the overhead and management that other vendors’ deduplication schemes require.

Unitrends sells X64-based backup and archive appliances that collect data from agents that deploy to i/OS, Windows, Unix, and Linux servers. The company, which also offers cloud storage, says its SATA-equipped appliances help to simplify its customers’ backup, recovery, and archive workloads by offering everything they need in one pre-configured package.

Now, Unitrends can add data deduplication to the list of desirable backup features that customers get out-of-the-box, without having to involve another technology provider.

The vendor says its flavor of “adaptive” data deduplication tailors the rate of compression and data deduplication based on several factors, including the type of content being protected, and the amount of disk, memory, and processor resources available to deduplication schemes.

Building deduplication directly into the Unitrends devices keeps costs lower compared to alternatives, says Mark Campbell, chief operating officer for Unitrends. “With adaptive deduplication, we are delivering the advantages of deduplication without the capital expense of dedicated hardware-based deduplication devices,” Campbell says. “The result is a cost-effective deduplication solution that offers better performance and manageability than software-based solutions.”

Unitrends, which has supported the System i server since about 2005, says about 50 of its 1,500 or so customers use the backup devices with System i servers. The company will be hosting a Webinar on the deduplication technology May 18 at 2 p.m. EDT titled “Don’t Get Duped by Dedupe: Introducing Adaptive Deduplication.” For more info or to register for the event, see the vendor’s Web site at www.unitrends.com.