Recovery-Series, Purpose-built Backup Appliances from Unitrends Date: June 2015 Author: Vinny Choinski, Senior Lab Analyst

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1 ESG Lab Review Recovery-Series, Purpose-built Backup Appliances from Unitrends Date: June 2015 Author: Vinny Choinski, Senior Lab Analyst Abstract: This ESG Lab review documents hands-on testing of the Unitrends Recovery-Series Appliances with a focus on simplified data protection, agility and, most importantly, recoverability. The Challenges ESG s 2015 IT Spending Intentions Survey revealed that, as they have been since 2010, increased use of server virtualization, improved backup and recovery, and data growth management remain in the top ten most frequently cited IT priorities. 1 Furthermore, the demands on organizations to more efficiently manage data and storage requirements continue to increase while environments become increasingly complex. It s not surprising to find that with these priorities and challenges, data protection appliances (DPAs) are in high demand (see Figure 1) as organizations of all sizes seek to improve their protection, recoverability, and data agility, while simultaneously reducing CapEx and OpEx. 2 In fact, nearly three-quarters (72%) of surveyed organizations expect the majority of their backup workloads to be handled by purpose-built backup appliances (either physical or virtual) within two years. 3 Figure 1. Organizations Usage Plans for Data Protection Appliances Please indicate your organization s usage of or plans for each of the following appliances. (Percent of respondents, N=299) Currently use No use or plans at this time but we are interested Don t know Do not currently use but we plan to No use, plans, or interest at this time Backup appliance (BA) 64% 16% 13% 7% 1% Storage/deduplication appliance (SA) 54% 21% 14% 9% 2% Gateway appliance (GA) 10% 42% 30% 14% 3% Failover appliance (FA) 8% 49% 28% 12% 2% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, Source: ESG Research Report, 2015 IT Spending Intentions Survey, February Source: Ibid. 3 Source ESG Research Report, The Shift Toward Data Protection Appliances, March The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab s expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by Unitrends.

2 ESG Lab Review: Recovery-Series, Purpose-built Backup Appliances from Unitrends 2 The Solution: Recovery-Series Backup Appliance Family The Unitrends Recovery-Series Appliance family is a turnkey, all-in-one data protection appliance series that integrates purpose-built hardware with enterprise backup and recovery software. The series is designed to scale from the small or remote office to the enterprise. The appliances scale from a 2-core CPU version with 1 TB of raw storage up to a 16-core CPU model with 97 TB of raw storage. A customer can integrate multiple appliances into her backup environment and leverage single-pane-of-glass administration via the Recovery-Series management interface. Key features include: Integrated Hardware with 2 to 16 cores of CPU, 8 to 256 GB of RAM, and 1 to 97 TB of raw storage capacity. Larger models, the 713S series and up, include hot-swap drives for ease of maintenance and modeldependent 128 GB to 480 GB tiered SSD flash for improved performance. Recovery-Series integrates the latest generation Unified Data Protection software from Unitrends. This same software also powers Unitrends Enterprise Backup (UEB) for customers who want a software-only virtual backup appliance instead of a physical appliance. Integrated Data Protection Application for physical and virtual asset protection. Recovery-Series enables granular file- and object-level restore. It includes comprehensive virtual machine protection at the hypervisor level as well as deep within each virtual machine. Recovery-Series supports multi-server scheduling, group management, and application-aware data protection. Recovery Assurance with Unitrends Bridge instant recovery features. Recovery-Series enables users to instantly recover from the backup appliance, physical servers to virtual environments (P2V), or virtual to virtual (V2V) for recovery validation or migration back to production. Recovery-Series also supports bare metal restore to dissimilar hardware. Global Deduplication with Unitrends Adaptive Deduplication, which leverages efficient integration between Recovery-Series job content (e.g., synthetic and incremental forever) and the variable block-size deduplication algorithm. Replication with Adaptive Deduplication and compression for WAN optimization, faster data transfers, improved storage utilization, and byte-level encryption for secure data transmission. Figure 2. Unitrends Recovery-Series Backup Appliance Family

3 ESG Lab Tested ESG Lab Review: Recovery-Series, Purpose-built Backup Appliances from Unitrends 3 ESG Lab performed hands-on testing of the Recovery-Series Backup Appliances at the Unitrends corporate facility in Burlington, MA. Testing was focused on how the agile Recovery-Series architecture enables easy deployment, management, and scalability while providing assured data protection to Unitrends customers. Getting Started ESG Lab started its testing by first reviewing the Recovery-Series architecture, features, and functions and then exploring the management interface by navigating through its options and conducting setup, configuration, and management tasks. As shown in Figure 3, the test environment consisted of virtual and physical data protection clients on the left, a LAN attached local Recovery-Series appliance in the middle, and multiple WAN attached appliances on the left, represented by the blue appliance icon in the cloud. The WAN attached appliances were used to simulate the remote deployment of an appliance in a private third-party hosted or Unitrends cloud configuration. For ease of deployment, the Recovery-Series Appliance hardware comes with the appliance operating system preinstalled and pre-configured, and with the Unified Data Protection backup application pre-installed and tuned for the size of the appliance. Initial configuration requires a locally attached monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The initial setup is used to connect the appliance to the network and only requires answering a few simple network questions. Once the appliance is on the network, the appliance configuration can be completed by using a web browser to connect to the configuration wizard. Final configuration takes only a couple of minutes and requires only a few entries such as host name, password, date, time, and whether the system will be used for backup, replication, or both. You also have the option to load agents and register backup clients through the wizard. The Recovery-Series solution supports multiple backup types, including file, application, operation system, and virtual machine infrastructure. It also supports full, incremental, differential, synthetic, selective, and bare metal backup. The test environment was configured to validate a number of architecture features, including configuring appliance storage pools for data protection, backing up and restoring data for virtual and physical clients from the locally deployed appliance replication and instant recovery, and remotely restoring from a replicated backup job. Figure 3. Recovery-Series Test Environment Overview

4 ESG Lab Review: Recovery-Series, Purpose-built Backup Appliances from Unitrends 4 Next, the Lab logged into the Recovery-Series interface to review the management capabilities of the solution. As shown at the top of Figure 4, the Lab navigated to the settings tab for the BRU-LAB-936S appliance. The top right side of Figure 4 shows the backup client already configured to the solutions. These clients include Solaris, Linux, Window, and even Novell, to name a few. ESG Lab used the Add Client icon to launch the client configuration wizard and add a new Windows client to the test environment. There are only a couple of required fields necessary to add a client to the configuration. These include computer type and client name or IP address. We then had the option to automatically configure a backup schedule, replication, and encryption for the new client or to finish the wizard and manually configure these options. As shown on the bottom left of Figure 4, the Lab used the calendar-based scheduler window to display and configure a backup schedule for the new Windows test client. As discussed, this option can be configured automatically or manually. It should be noted that if the automatic option is selected during the wizard configuration process, then a file-level backup will be initiated for the client at the completion of the wizard process. Also, whether created manually or automatically, the schedule can be modified at any time using the intuitive drag-and-drop color-coded icons displayed on the left side of the scheduler. The Unitrends solution provides a great deal of granularity for configuring data protection features. Along with the intuitive scheduler, the solution enables multi-server scheduling and group management, allowing dependent or similar clients to be grouped together in a backup schedule. Figure 4. Management and Configuration

5 ESG Lab Review: Recovery-Series, Purpose-built Backup Appliances from Unitrends 5 Lastly, ESG Lab explored the monitoring capabilities of the Recovery-Series solution. As shown in Figure 5, the Lab navigated to the status tab for a vcenter host configuration for virtual machine backups. The left side of Figure 5 shows the actual host highlighted and the right side displays detailed information about the backup status. Information is displayed in a color-coded green, yellow, and red layout for easy identification of backup issues. The top right of Figure 5 shows the status of the last seven days of backup in this case, seven green boxes. The expanded calendar view shows a month s worth of backups. This view allows for the quick identification and exploration of backup issues as indicated by the partial red box on April 17 th. Further details for issue remediation are available by clicking on the specific day. Figure 5. Solution Monitoring Why This Matters As corporate compute environments grow and recovery objectives change, data protection solutions must have the agility to keep pace with new protection requirements and data growth challenges. However, few IT organizations have unlimited resources or time to dedicate to overly complex backup and recovery infrastructure. Today s protection solutions must be easy to deploy, manage, configure, and monitor. ESG Lab validated that the Unitrends Recovery-Series purpose-built appliances provide flexible, scalable, and easy-to-use data protection solutions for highly diverse IT infrastructures. The Recovery-Series supports a long list of physical and virtual operating systems and applications. It provides the features and options to configure enterprise-class data protection workflows for backup and recovery, replication, and archive on optimized hardware with deduplication, compression, and encryption for data transmission.

6 Data Protection Assurance ESG Lab Review: Recovery-Series, Purpose-built Backup Appliances from Unitrends 6 With the Unitrends Recovery-Series Backup Appliance solution, customers have a number of options for validating, restoring, or retrieving business-critical protected data. The solution supports standard backup, restore, and replication functionality as well as integration with optional data protection servers such as Unitrends No Limits Cloud or Unitrends Forever Cloud and Unitrends disaster recovery services. In this section of the report, the Lab covers an application-level restore on a physical server, instant recovery of a Microsoft Exchange VM, and archiving to Amazon S3 cloud services. As shown in Figure 6, ESG Lab used the Recovery-Series management interface to do an object-level restore on a physical Microsoft server running Microsoft SQL Server. The top left and right of Figure 6 show the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio view for the test environment database instances. The top left shows the database view before an object-level restore, and the right side shows after the restore. As shown in the middle of Figure 6, the Lab used the Recovery-Series management to select the content of a Data01 database backup for an object-level restore. The Lab chose to restore the backup into a new database named Test01_ESG. The process restored and started the new database on the physical test server as shown by the two red callout boxes in Figure 6. It should be noted that the process was made possible by the agent-level support offered in the Recovery-Series solution. The process enabled ESG Lab to complete a granular object-level recovery of only the required data. This can help improve recovery time by eliminating the need to do full restores when only a small part of the backup data set needs to be recovered. Figure 6. Application-level Protection

7 ESG Lab Review: Recovery-Series, Purpose-built Backup Appliances from Unitrends 7 Next, ESG Lab tested the instant recovery capabilities of the Recovery-Series solution. We used instant recovery to confirm the integrity of a Microsoft Exchange virtual machine backup image. Instant recovery can be used to quickly mount and boot a virtual machine to test the reliability of the backup or as a step in fully returning the VM to a production state. Instant restore supports virtual (V2V) and physical (P2V) restores. As shown in Figure 7, the Lab used the Add a Virtual Failover Client utility to conduct the instant recovery testing. The left side of Figure 7 shows the high-level options available for the procedure. The process allows the user to define the virtual failover client location, which selects the appliance that will present the storage and the virtual host type, VMware or Hyper-V, which will run the restored virtual machine. The upper right side of Figure 7 shows the vcenter view of the instant recovery job. The red callout box on the left side of the vcenter view shows the booted and accessible, instantly recovered MSEXCH01_restore_ESG virtual machine. The red callout box on the right shows the instant recovery NFS datastore mounted from the Recovery-Series Appliance. For the instant recovery test, the Lab used a replicated backup on a remote appliance to recover the virtual machine on a remote VMware cluster. The diagram at the bottom of Figure 7 depicts a workflow view of an instant recovery job. The left side of the diagram shows a VMware host with three virtual machines. The middle of the diagram shows the Recovery-Series Appliance, and the left side shows the volumes configured on the appliance. The blue disk icon on the left represents the space configured on the appliance for instant recoveries, and the orange disk icon is for backup and replication data. The blue VM on the left side of Figure 7 represents the virtual machine that was instantly recovered from a backup image located on the appliance and NFS mounted the VMware host. The two grey VMs are running from a local datastore on the VMware host server. Figure 7. Instant Recovery

8 ESG Lab Review: Recovery-Series, Purpose-built Backup Appliances from Unitrends 8 Lastly, ESG Lab used the Recovery-Series management interface to configure Amazon S3 archive storage to the test environment. As shown in Figure 8, we used the Add Archive Storage utility to select the cloud provider, added the required access credentials, and had the archive pointing to an existing Amazon account in seconds. The Unitrends public cloud archive option can help customers simplify the management of non-active/lightly accessed data with long-term retention requirements. Figure 8. Archiving to the Cloud Why This Matters Quick and efficient backup and archive are extremely important aspects of data protection, but it s far more important to be confident in the recoverability or retrieval of that data. Why? Because when things go wrong, organizations depend on their data protection solutions to get their businesses back up and running. ESG Lab confirmed the ability to successfully recover data with the Unitrends Recovery-Series appliance solution from physical and virtual backup jobs. We used the solution to recover an individual database from a physical SQL server backup. The Lab leveraged the instant recovery features to restore for test a Microsoft Exchange virtual machine from a replicated backup on a remote appliance. And we set up a public cloud archive at Amazon S3 for long-term offsite archive and retrieval.

9 The Bigger Truth ESG Lab Review: Recovery-Series, Purpose-built Backup Appliances from Unitrends 9 The Unitrends Recovery-Series Backup Appliances are a family of turnkey data protection solutions designed to help customers simplify protection management while tackling the challenges of growing backup data and shrinking backup windows. The solution integrates powerful enterprise backup and recovery software with purpose-built hardware delivered as an integrated appliance. The Recovery-Series software enables the management of multiple appliances in a single solution. It can be seamlessly scaled by simply adding more appliances as the environment grows. The Recovery- Series is the backbone of a comprehensive Unitrends ecosystem that touches on each of ESG s defined backup appliance categories. It starts as a turnkey appliance with the combination of protection software and integrated hardware. Each appliance delivers storage with deduplication that can be easily sliced into backup, replication, and instant recovery containers in much the same way a dedicated target appliance can be. It can be configured for one-way or bidirectional replication between appliances, Unitrends multi-tenant cloud facilities, and third-party hybrid cloud offerings, similar to a cloud gateway appliance. Finally, when integrated with Unitrends disaster recovery services, it functions as a failover BC/DR appliance. Because of these attributes, one could call it a hyper-converged solution for data protection. ESG Lab tested the Unitrends Recovery-Series solution and found that it offered the features and functions needed to create enterprise-level data protection workflows. We were able to quickly and easily configure physical servers and virtual machines for protection. We leveraged the management UI to create and schedule backup jobs for individual hosts as well as multiple servers. The solution supports a long list of operating systems, enables group-level management, and supports application-aware data protections configurations. The Lab was able to leverage an application-aware configuration to quickly restore a single database from a multiple database SQL server backup. The Recovery-Series solution leverages tight hardware integration with enterprise backup software that uses the same software engine as Unitrends Enterprise Backup, an application that has been around for quite some time, as indicated by its long OS and application support list and its extensive features and functions. ESG Lab believes that if Unitrends can continue to differentiate itself from all the other players in this noisy market segment and stay customer focused with programs such as the free hardware refresh program with active three to five year support contracts, and the No Limit Licensing (no per-client fee) agreements then the Unitrends appliance family will have a bright future. All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at