Unitrends, a leader in enterprise-level cloud recovery, today announced the availability of Release 8.1, the latest version of the robust data protection software powering its Recovery-Series family of physical backup and disaster recovery appliances as well as its Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ (UEB) virtual appliance. Release 8.1 provides customers with up to 50 times faster backup windows, a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) deployment option and advanced support for VMware vSphere 6.
 
“We switched to Unitrends two years ago because the company provides the ability to do both virtual and physical appliance backups within one product, greatly reducing our total cost of ownership,” said Chad Bryan, network administrator at the University of Northwestern Ohio. “Since becoming a customer, the company has continually delivered cutting-edge data protection features that make our lives easier.”
 
Up to 50 Times Faster Backup Windows
Release 8.1 includes a new changed-block tracking feature for Microsoft Hyper-V environments. This new filter driver more optimally tracks changes to virtual machines at the hypervisor level as they occur, resulting in up to 50 times faster incremental backup windows and much shorter recovery point objectives (RPOs).
 
Full Support for VMware vSphere 6
This release also extends VMware protection to support vSphere 6. In addition to hypervisor-based protection, Unitrends also enables the protection of applications and operating systems within one or more VMware vSphere virtual machine(s). With this feature, administrators can set different RPOs, recovery time objectives (RTOs) and service level agreements (SLAs) at the hypervisor level as well as granularly within the virtual machines themselves. They can also granularly control the amount of data to be protected rather than having to select the entire virtual machine.
 
UEB on RHEL 
Driven by market and customer demand, deployment options for UEB now include execution directly on RHEL in addition to packaged virtual appliances for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. The RHEL integration provides greater scalability for larger enterprises and includes direct attach for tape archiving.
 
Unitrends Free™
Unitrends Release 8.1 is the engine behind the company’s newly released Unitrends Free software, a free virtual storage appliance aimed at IT professionals seeking cost-effective protection for home labs, early-stage virtualization projects and small environments. To download Unitrends Free, go to:www.UnitrendsFree.com.
 
Additional enterprise-class features of Release 8.1 include:
 

• Support for RHEL 7, Ubuntu 14 and Mac OS 10.10
• Complete protection for Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn Failover Clusters, which delivers enhanced physical and deep virtual protection for local high availability
• Support for NetApp Cluster Mode, which provides high-availability configurations for large environments
• Advanced support for Oracle Automatic Storage Management, which ensures critical data is protected both on- and off-premise

 

 
“Release 8.1 demonstrates our continued commitment to providing flexible backup and recovery solutions that adapt to any IT environment,” said Mark Campbell, Unitrends’ chief technology officer. “With our proven data protection offerings, customers can stop worrying about data loss and downtime, and instead focus on strategic IT projects that drive business growth.”
 
To download a free trial of Unitrends Release 8.1, go to: https://unitrends.com/products/download/ueb. To register for a live online demo of 8.1, please visit: https://unitrends.com/resources/product-demonstration.