Unitrends

Unitrends Corporation

Type	Private
Industry	Information technology
Founded	1989
Headquarters	Burlington, MA, United States
Key people	Kevin Weiss (CEO), Mark Campbell (CTO)
Products	Backup and Disaster Recovery Appliances and Related Products
Website	www.unitrends.com

Unitrends Inc. is a US-based company specializing in backup and business continuity. The company’s portfolio of virtual, physical, and cloud solutions provides adaptive protection and network-based disk-to-disk, vertically integrated backup appliances for data protection and disaster recovery.^[1]

Products

Unitrends produces a number of physical appliances ranging from small desktop backup appliances to large rack-mounted backup appliances. Unitrends also produces virtual appliances for VMware and Hyper-V marketed as Unitrends Enterprise Backup. The physical appliances typically consist of some level of redundant components; most notably RAID in the form of RAID 1, RAID 6, and RAID 10.^[2] These appliances have a “personality” that allows each to perform either on-premises backup, off-premises disaster recovery, or through a technology known as cross-vaulting (a form of replication) an appliance may concurrently perform on-premises backup and off-premises disaster recovery.^[3] Unitrends also offers a multi-tenant public cloud based service that the company calls “Unitrends Cloud.” The company states that Unitrends Cloud is based on its previous product offering using its backup appliances to perform off-premises disaster recovery in a single-tenant private cloud deployment methodology.^[4]

Technology

Unitrends uses file- and image-based backup techniques coupled with storage-based and in-flight encryption, compression and data deduplication. The technology supports Bare-Metal restore as well as file-based recovery.^[5] Unitrends supports a form of disk staging in what it terms as D2D2x (Disk-to-Disk-to-Any) where “x” can be a disk, a tape, a private single-tenant cloud, or a public multi-tenant cloud.^[6] The company attempts to sell its support of storage, operating system, and application heterogeneity and claims that it supports over 100 versions of operating systems and applications.^[7] Unitrends states that it uses a web 2.0 user interface that allows it to manage from one to hundreds of its appliances in a single pane of glass.^[8] Products are available through a network of dealers and value added resellers.

History

Since its inception in the mid-1980s, Unitrends Software Corporation has been at the forefront of backup and crash-recovery technology. The first with a software solution for system crashes, the company today provides a comprehensive set of tools to help manage and protect business-critical data while providing 100 percent data availability. Unitrends originated from a sole proprietorship called Medflex, which was founded in 1985 by Steve W. Schwartz, M.D.^[9] to help fund medical missions. The first product, CTAR (Compressing Tape Archiver), was originally developed to handle the backup problems Schwartz encountered in his own medical office. After perfecting the program, it was sold commercially. In 1988, Unitrends developed the first complete crash-recovery product for Santa Cruz Operation^[10]’s XENIX systems originally called Jet RestoreEase. Unitrends supported additional operating systems for SCO such as OpenServer and UnixWare. Unitrends started as a stand-alone Unix backup software company and provided BareMetal recovery for platforms like the SCO offerings. BareMetal was later ported to SCO Unix and renamed System Crash Air-Bag. This popular software package allowed full recovery from a system crash within 18 minutes or less. From 1988 to 1991, 10 other software products were written for the XENIX and Unix environments and in 1999, Unitrends released their Backup Professional client/server backup software. In September 2002, Unitrends recruited a major client and shipped backup appliances to Toshiba Machine Co. of America. The list of solutions shipped to Toshiba consisted of 1U 40, 80, 120, and 160 GB. Come November, a line of 2U appliances was introduced, offering 360 and 540 GB options. Unitrends, has held a variety of locations during its existence. Initially based out of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, headquarters were relocated further inland to Columbia in November 2003 while support and development remained on the coast until 2005. In 2014, headquarters were moved again to Burlington, Massachusetts.^[11] where they remain today.

Growth and Acquisition

On October 31, 2013, Unitrends was acquired by Insight Venture Partners,^[12] a large global private equity and venture capital firm. Shortly after this acquisition, Unitrends obtained PHD Virtual on December 16, adding the resume of this virtual backup and disaster recovery solution innovator to its own. Unitrends acquired another company on May 29, 2014, taking over Australian-based Yuruware, another innovator of data protection technology who had served companies such as Openstack and Amazon Web Services.

Partner Programs

Unitrends offers partners program for resellers and MSPs, currently working with thousands of companies from across the country.

2014-2015

The executive and operational management of Unitrends include:

• Kevin Weiss, President/CEO
• Mark Campbell, CTO^[13]
• Brad Miller, CFO^[14]

Awards

• DCIG Virtual Server Backup Software Guide 2014-2015 Best in Class-Ranked #1
• 2015 Business Solutions’ Best Channel Vendors 2015-Recognized
• CRN Tech Innovators Award 2014-Honorable Mention
• Inc. 500/5000 of 2014-Ranked #1010
• Deloitte’s 2014 Technology Fast 500-Ranked #198

Unitrends is part of Insight Venture Partners investment portfolio.^[15]

References

External links

• Unitrends official website