Unitrends today announced general availability of Unitrends Release 7.4, a substantially evolved version of the software underpinning its unified solution suite of radically simple physical and virtual data protection and disaster recovery solutions. Delivering major improvements to retention, recovery, replication and archiving as well as disaster recovery orchestration and governance, Release 7.4 affords customers an unprecedented ability to configure and incrementally scale the right solutions mix of on-premise, second-site and cloud backup and recovery capabilities to address their organization's unique multi-environment data protection needs.

Faster Backups, Speedier Replication, Enhanced Deduplication, More Retention

With Release 7.4, Unitrends achieves yet another milestone in enabling enterprises to play IT safe. The software has drastically upgraded Unified Enterprise Backup (UEB) and Recovery Series performance, offering a host of significant enhancements, including:                                                                                       

• 100% improvement in data retention and 10X faster replication: Customers gain more retention and faster replication resulting from enhanced de-duplication characteristics of a new unified bare metal/master backup type, representing the most significant advancement in bare metal recovery since the company's inception.
  

• Unitrends Bridge: Customers are able to transform physical Windows systems into virtual machines with this one-click physical to virtual (P2V) feature. This capability enables instant recovery and considerably drives down recovery time objectives (RTOs) for physical as well as virtual backups.
  

• 100% RTO advancement: By eliminating the need to restore the bare metal and then file-based backup, RTO for physical windows recovery has been significantly reduced. In addition, Unitrends has introduced its physical and virtual GOS-level UEB Windows Instant Recovery (WIR) capabilities. The company remains the only in-vendor in the industry offering both GOS- and HOS-level instant recovery.
  

• 50% to 200% acceleration in archiving: Expanding on its already unmatched D2D2x archiving capabilities, Unitrends has implemented a parallel configuration that enables multiple jobs to execute concurrently.
  

• VMware Certified Application Recovery (V-CAR): Combining Unitrends appliances with ReliableDR 3.4, users can now orchestrate recovery processes directly from data backed up by Unitrends Enterprise Backup. Then, business rules are applied to certify the correct execution of business continuity and disaster recovery SLA compliance requirements.

"Unitrends Enterprise Backup is a fantastic product that doesn't sacrifice virtual world capabilities in order to integrate your physical backup needs," said Roy Mikes, an industry thought leader with expertise in virtualization, storage and cloud technology. "In this case, I agree with the description that you can simply, quickly and reliably recover your IT Infrastructure anytime, anywhere."

Automated Testing and Governance for Disaster Recovery

Unitrends has also tightly integrated ReliableDR with its UEB and Recovery Series appliances. This allows customers to seamlessly leverage the backup products to validate, on a continuous and routine basis, that recovery will be successful every time it's performed. ReliableDR automates testing, at an application level, to give enterprises iron-clad proof that their virtual machines are working together properly and that backups meet application RTOs and recovery point objectives (RPOs). Unitrends is also announcing its new V-CAR feature to enable a much more affordable option for customers to do DR Testing and Governance, which will start at $149/virtual machine. 

Additional noteworthy advancements in Release 7.4 include:

• Enhanced reporting capabilities with web-based user interface through which reports can be created in Adobe Acrobat PDF format for WYSIWYG viewing, distribution and printing.
• Oracle 12c and enhanced Linux distribution support.
• Integration with Unitrends Cloud for No Limits Cloud replication.

"Unitrends Release 7.4 moves us even farther beyond the point-product orientation of most of our competitors, strengthening our ability to help customers simply, quickly and reliably recover their diverse IT infrastructures anywhere, anytime," said Joe Balazs, vice president of engineering for Recovery Series, UEB, and Unitrends Cloud. "We are delivering innovative conversion and recovery technologies such as Unitrends Bridge, Unified Bare Metal Recovery and instant recovery for physical, virtual and cloud-configured environments-plus optimizing all of that with incomparable disaster recovery testing, orchestration and governance."