Unitrends Spins up DRaaS Offering in the Cloud

Five Key Considerations for Backup & Recovery

For a lot of folks, backup is a necessary evil. They know that it’s simpler and more reliable to spin up another instance of their applications running in another data center. The challenge has been that the cost of using such services has been fairly prohibitive for most IT organizations to consider using.

Unitrends is trying to change that with the roll out of a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering that provides organizations the ability to replicate data between VMware virtual machines running in the cloud of their choice.

Subo Guha, vice president of product management and marketing for Unitrends, says IT organizations can deploy a Unitrends physical or virtual appliance in their local environment that can be configured with between one to 97TB of local storage. In the event of a disaster, Unitrends will then then spin up VMware virtual machines in the cloud to provide access to their applications within a few hours at a cost that ranges from 18 cents per gigabyte (GB) per month to 32 cents per GB per month, depending on the level of recovery time required.

Customers can either set this capability up themselves or contract Unitrends to deliver “white glove” service that manages the recovery process for them in the event of a disaster. In either scenario, Guha says customers now have an affordable option of maintaining access to their most critical applications, while continuing to rely—if they so choose—on lower cost traditional backup and recovery software for less critical applications.

The problem with traditional backup and recovery, of course, is that it’s always been more of an challenge than most IT organizations care to deal with. Instead of wondering whether the business can actually recover the files and applications that make it run, various classes of DRaaS offerings are finally starting to make recovery more of a certainty.