Unitrends Recovery Series Gen 8 backup appliances
Unitrends has updated its Recovery Series backup appliance to Gen 8, with added features like machine learning-based ransomware protection and automatic recovery testing.
Bronze winner in Storage magazine and SearchStorage's 2018 Products of the Year in backup and disaster recovery hardware category.
Unitrends appliances, backup software and cloud component are treated as one entire on-premises-to-cloud package in Unitrends Recovery Series backup appliances.
The bronze winner for data protection hardware consists of Unitrends Recovery Series appliances in sizes ranging from 2 TB to 120 TB, Unitrends Backup version 10.2 and integration with Unitrends Cloud to form a comprehensive backup product.
The appliance covers a variety of data protection workloads and capabilities, including deduplication, long-term data retention, ransomware protection, recovery testing and cloud failover.
One of the new features is an automated recovery testing mechanism. Unitrends appliances automatically spin up and test the backup environment in a sandbox and document recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), assuring admins backups are recoverable and can meet objectives.
One judge called this feature out in particular, saying it is "best-in-class recovery assurance with outstanding automated recovery testing and reporting -- overall, a very nice implementation."
The Unitrends Recovery Series boasts other useful new features. It uses machine learning in its ransomware detection, identifying potential unauthorized encryption. It has a service-level agreement policy engine that automatically applies policies to meet RTOs and RPOs set by admins. Finally, a "self-healing" feature monitors disk health and can predict future drive failures.
This series of Unitrends appliances consists of 15 different models with different storage capacities. It is also designed to be as turnkey as possible. Appliances arrive with fully configured hardware, software and OS out of the box, and they fully support more than 250 environments, including VMware, Nutanix AHV, AWS and Azure.
With its slew of new features, one judge summed up Unitrends Recovery Series appliances as "a useful backup system." However, criticisms arose around ransomware detection. One judge said, "Ransomware prevention is OK, but fails to prevent most backup infections versus detonations," indicating that even if the software can detect malware and call for a restore, it has no way of ensuring the backup copy isn't also infected.
