Unitrends Has Answers

When it comes to disaster recovery planning, many businesses start out well enough: they conduct initial testing of their backup and restoration approach, relying on this plan ever after. Meanwhile, these same businesses continue to grow, and with them, their store of data grows, too, leaving their original disaster recovery plan outdated and their operations at severe risk.

Updating your backup and recovery strategy doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch. Unitrends can leverage your existing tape infrastructure, growing your solution with your changing business environment by adding backup appliances and rotational media that meet your organization’s quick recovery demands.

Are You Prepared?

Consider these statistics:

• Forty percent of all companies that experience a major disaster will go out of business if they cannot gain access to their data within twenty-four hours (Gartner)
• Every year one in five hundred businesses will experience a severe disaster (McGladrey and Pullen)
• Forty-three percent of companies that experience disasters never re-open, and twentynine percent close within two years (McGladrey and Pullen)
• Ninety-three percent of businesses that lost their data center for ten days went bankrupt within one year (National Archives & Records Administration)

One industry survey indicates that more than 80% of all companies operate with some disaster recovery plan, while the rest forge ahead without any plan at all. Those that do have a plan, however, may be unknowingly under-protected. Do you know for sure that your business is well prepared for a disaster?

Disaster Plannin

g In IT organizations, planning for a disaster can involve a montage of concerns. Natural or man-made, from disasters as simple as a power outage to complex ones such as an earthquake, all require the proper plan, and the technology to meet that plan’s objectives. Unitrends bases its data protection solutions on modular strategies that keep pace with midsize to large businesses, while affording the right fit for more modest-sized environments, helping you not only to establish right-sized storage, but also the right price tag for your particular data protection needs.

The variables of disaster planning you’ll want to consider include:

• Ready for Anything
  • When it comes to disasters, all are not created equal. Deciding on the correct solution to meet your needs means you need to start by identifying the possible types of disasters from which you want to defend your business resources.
• Continuous Operation
  • Does your business need to continue without disruption, whatever the disaster situation? For some organizations, business continuity is a must, requiring a failover scenario as part of the overall disaster recovery plan. During failover, as restoration proceeds for primary systems, secondary systems take over to provide seamless continuation of your business operations.
• Remote Control
  • Some businesses need to support remote locations along with a central site, providing them the same protection as if those sites were collocated with central operations. Backup of remote data to a central site can eat up bandwidth, as would restoration to these sites from a central backup, in the event of disaster.
• Meeting Your Objectives
  • First, the what: To get the right protection for your environment, you need to know what data you want to protect. To determine this, you specify a recovery point objective (RPO), or the age of files you need to recover from backup storage for normal operations to resume in case of disruption. The RPO is represented in seconds, minutes, hours, or days, back to a point in the past, from the instant at which failure occurs. By contrast, the “when,” or recovery time objective (RTO), indicates the timeframe your business can tolerate disruption of operations, also measured in seconds, minutes, hours, or days.
• Periodic Testing
  • Once you’ve got a disaster recovery strategy, it makes sense to check for proper completion of backups and to ensure that data does not become corrupted. As a business and its data grows, its disaster recovery solution must adapt to meet those changes. Regular tests of your disaster strategy can help to ensure a sound strategy.

How Unitrends Can Help

With all these considerations, nothing less than a comprehensive, rapid recovery solution will do, and that’s where Unitrends solutions lead the way.

• Ready for Anything
  • Expert in disaster recovery solutions for more than two decades, Unitrends leads the industry in enterprise-level data protection, with the #1 all-in-one backup solution for virtual, physical, and cloud. Unitrends knows disaster recovery inside and out, with a US-based support team that delivers 99% customer satisfaction.
• Continuous Operation
  • Unitrends provides point-in-time data recovery and speedy restoration of failed systems. Choose a hot/cold recovery strategy to replicate from an offpremise device to a collocated standby appliance, and restoring from that standby. For the speediest strategy, choose hot/hot recovery, for direct replication to the primary site from the remote standby appliance. When a VMware or Windows system fails, your Unitrends appliance becomes the virtual host of the failed system. In the case of a VMware failure, the VMware system is recovered to a new virtual machine, and your Unitrends appliance becomes the provisioned virtual storage provider. In the case of a Windows failure, the recovered Windows system runs directly on the Unitrends appliance. Recovery typically happens in less than five minutes. In the event of a disaster, the Unitrends Vault2Cloud comes with a next-day shipping guarantee of a new, fully loaded appliance.
• Remote Control
  • Virtual or physical, Unitrends offers protection across your organization regardless of operating system, server, and storage. A common disk-todisk backup and recovery engine covers more than 100 different versions of operating systems, hypervisors, and applications through a single management interface. 
• Meeting Your Objectives
  • With Simply Scalable™ architecture, Unitrends can scale-out backup appliances for centralized and distributed sites alike, protecting your data as your retention needs grow. You decide what data (RPO) you need and how long (RTO) you need it. Unitrends lets you schedule incremental backups for as often as every 60 seconds, so you’ll never lose more thana minute’s worth of data.
• Periodic Testing
  • Subtle interactions between components or missing elements can often only be identified by simulatting each kind of disaster, tracking what works, what doesn’t, and how long each step takes. Unitrends can help you plan and perform regular tests of your disaster strategy to ensure you maintain the right fit for your growing business.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Unplanned interruption in your business can cause loss of customers and prospects. The strategy you choose to guard against that loss depends on these three factors:

• How much data you need to protect 
• How long you can endure downtime of operations
• Your IT budget

These factors will inform your decision to adopt a virtual, cloud, or physical disaster recovery method, or some combination of these, to support your data protection needs.

Virtual and Cloud-Based Strategies

Statistics indicate that all aspects of data processing will increase exponentially over the next decade. Servers will mutiply tenfold, data will grow 50 times over, and systems will manage 75 times as many files as they currently do. Comparatively, IT staff will grow only 1.5 times during the same timeframe, forcing IT organizations to look to alternatives to do more with less. To address such an explosion of infrastructure, some IT managers already recognize virtual assets as a way to maximize resources for backup and recovery.

Even so, consolidation comes with its share of disaster planning tradeoffs, particularly when it comes to virtualization. While it increases productivity of servers and applications, and reduces the number of physical resources to manage, “...60 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace,” according to Gartner. Further, resource consolidation increases the amount of data to recover, stretching the amount of time it would take to accomplish the initial load of data. For example, moving 50TB of data to a disaster recovery site could take days to complete, and would significantly tax bandwidth.

Fortunately, Unitrends solutions can minimize the inherent risks of virtualization:

• Instant Recovery
  • Once a Unitrends virtual asset becomes compromised, recovery of that machine can occur instantly, with immediate replacement of the potentially compromised asset.
• RapidSeed
  • Unitrends uses a seeding process for data to be moved from a primary to a disaster recovery site. A bulk load of data can be applied at the disaster recovery site for the initial load. Deltas or changes would then be applied to future updates of the disaster recovery data set.
• Vault2Cloud
  • You can vault your data with Unitrends’ multitenant cloud service. In the event of a disaster, Unitrends guarantees next-day shipping of a new, fully loaded appliance.

Physical Strategies

When systems fail, it’s servers, operating systems, and applications that delay recovery time. In fact, restoring failed systems is so complex and haphazard that they rarely return to their original state. If you’ve struggled to find a solution that offers complete, sophisticated data protection–without enterprise complexity and cost–your search is over. Unitrends offers everything you need for backup and disaster recovery, in one appliance. No need to stitch together hardware and software solutions. No need for specific products to protect your applications or your virtual infrastructure. The Unitrends Recovery Series provide one solution, with one easy-to-use interface.

All appliances come with the following features:

• No limits™ licensing
• Protection of 100+ OS versions and applications
• Continuous data protection
• Point-in-time protection
• Adaptive deduplication™
• Vault2Cloud™ enabled
• Rapid recovery console
• Instant recovery

Archiving and Vaulting

At first glance, vaulting and archiving seem to pose alternate solutions to the same business need. Both provide secure off-site storage and act as a secondary backup solution. Where they differ is in long-term data retention. Vaulting offers a solid disaster recovery solution, where an up-to-date copy of all your backups reside in a remote location. Vaulting, however, does not solve long-term data storage needs, since vaulting of new data replaces older backups.

Archiving provides the same protection as vaulting without overwriting that data. Regular archive disks can be securely stored off-site by a data protection company such as Iron Mountain or Recall, or taken home in your backpack, for that matter. But the advantage archiving has over vaulting is the opportunity to make a single copy of your data and store that particular copy for as long as you wish. You can use as many different disks as you can afford, making as many archives of your data as you need to comply with your legal data retention obligations.

Hot-Cold and Hot-Hot Recovery

While both offer clear advantages, hot-hot replication and retention simplifies disaster recovery by eliminating cumbersome and expensive two-step disaster recovery operations (hot-cold). This capability keeps disaster recovery sites active, online, and continuously updated, expediting restoration processes and preventing data loss due to backup windows.

Get Ready with Unitrends

Your environment requires a solution that not only meets your current disaster recovery objectives, but grows with your dynamic business environment. Unitrends provides an allin- one approach to data protection with refined, built-in features, all at an affordable price, including these advantages:

• Scale and Grow with your Business
  • By leveraging existing investments such as tape, legacy servers, and storage, Unitrends maximizes your resource utilization while adapting to your data growth.
• Single point of contact
  • Your questions for data protection strategies are addressed by Unitrends with a USbased customer support team that boasts a 99% Net Promoter Score (NPS)-based customer satisfaction rate.
• Complete Protection
  • Physical, virtual, and cloud-enabled protection preserves the data you need to shield from loss in the event of a disaster. As other businesses, you know you need to minimize the risk of unplanned downtime. You can rely on Unitrends and our 20+ years of expertise in data protection to help you do just that.