Unitrends Enterprise Backup 7.5

by | Sep 11, 2014 | Unitrends

A couple of weeks ago Unitrends announced their latest release of Unitrends Enterprise Backup, namely version 7.5. The last couple of days I’ve been able to try this new version and I must say I’m pretty impressed by all new features and the ease of use of this new version. First let’s start with the feature list and dive in to some of these further:

  • CloudHook for archiving to your cloud storage provider.
  • Navigation grouping for easy management of clients and virtual machines.
  • Support for Exchange incremental backups.
  • Support for multiple SQL restores.
  • New Policies report and Storage Footprint report.
  • System performance enhancements, including faster backups, faster replication, and faster VMware inventory scan.

CloudHook

With Unitrends CloudHook you have the possibility to archive your backups in the cloud. In earlier days we had to put our long-term backups on tape, because having the data that was been backuped in the same datacenter was no option. Getting it on tape and then moving it to another location ensured us of data salvation in case of a major event. With cloud storage becoming more and more available, companies are looking for this option to archive their backups. With Unitrends CloudHook you have the possibility to archive your backups into the cloud in a very efficient way. At the time of writing there are 3 cloud storage solutions supported by UEB 7.5 namely:

  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
  • Google Cloud Storage
  • Rackspace Cloud Files

Navigation Grouping

With Navigation grouping UEB 7.5 making backups of multiple VM’s or physical servers in an organized manner is easy. Group servers together to make navigation, monitoring, backup, restore, archiving and reporting much easier. The following list of items can be grouped together:

  • Physical Clients like Windows and Linux Servers
  • VMware VM’s
  • vApps
  • VMware templates
  • Resource pools
  • HyperV VM’s

Removing these groups is just as easy as creating them, and it will return the interface to the original state.

Exchange incremental backup support

UEB 7.5 provides the possibility to make incremental backups of your Exchange Database. This has a couple of benefits:

  • Incremental backups are quicker than differential backups and can thus be done more frequently. This benefit lays in the fact that a differential backup includes all changes since the full backup (it does not change the Archive flag) while incremental backups only backup the changes since the last incremental (it changes the archive flag)
  • Another benefit of incremental backups is the fact that log after completing a successful incremental, unneeded transaction log files are automatically truncated, freeing space on the Exchange server.

To use the Unitrends Exchange incremental backups the following requirements must be met:

  • The Unitrends appliance must be running version 7.5 at least.
  • The Windows agent must be version 7.5 or higher.
  • Differential and incremental backups cannot be in the same schedule.
  • A full backup must be in the schedule. The incremental forever strategy is not supported.

backup_mode_server

 

Multiple SQL restores support

Now you can restore multiple SQL databases with a single click. You can also create custom folders of protected servers and virtual machines – significantly reducing the clicks needed to manage protected assets. The only limitations on this is the Windows limitation which is 6 simultaneous restores can run at the same time

To use this feature you must meet the following requirements:

  • The Unitrends appliance must be running version 7.5 at least.
  • The Windows agent must be version 7.5 or higher.
  • Databases must be restored to the original SQL instance and name.

New reporting capabilities

With the UEB 7.5 release a couple of new reports are available, which will help you to produce better and more efficient reports on your UEB environment:

  • Policies report. This report contains information about the general data protection policies applied to your systems, including systems protected, retention settings, schedules, data included or excluded from backup, and backup type. This report, along with the Schedule History report, may be used to assist in satisfying regulatory compliance audits
  • Storage Footprint report. This report needs to run on replication targets to determine the amount of physical storage consumed by each replicating source system

System performance enhancements

UEB 7.5 features the following performance enhancements:

  • As UEB 7.5 now uses hardware assisted encryption leveraging the AES instruction set on the processor as well enhanced space reclamation algorithms provides for much faster backups.
  • Pipelining optimizations, hardware assisted encryption and improvements made to the algorithms that manage the replication queue provide a significant increase in faster replication.
  • In release 7.5 UEB provides a much faster VMware inventory scan for all environments.
  • With all the new features and improvements UEB 7.5 provides a smaller backup window and increased retention.

Arjan’s view

With all these new features and (performance) improvements as well as the fusion between two great companies (Unitrends and PHD Virtual), and their products, UEB 7.5 is a feature rich product which I can easily promote to all my customers. With the Unitrends team growing larger and larger and international the support for the Unitrends products is great. With backup and recovery on a modern way but with the possibility to leverage old and new infrastructures and features the UEB 7.5 is an awesome release which shows that Unitrends is a company to keep in mind.