Unitrends Inc. is a United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 based company specializing in network-based disk-to-disk

Disk-to-disk

The term "disk-to-disk", or "D2D", generally refers to disk-to-disk backup. With D2D, a computer hard disk is backed up to another hard disk rather than to a tape or floppy...

, vertically-integrated backup

Backup

In information technology, a backup or the process of backing up is making copies of data which may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form is back up in two words, whereas the noun is backup....

 appliances for business continuity

Business continuity

Business continuity is the activity performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. These activities include many daily chores such as project management,...

 and disaster recovery

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity...

.

Products

Unitrends produces a number of appliances ranging from small desktop backup appliances to large rack-mounted backup appliances. The appliances typically consist of some level of redundant components; most notably RAID

RAID

RAID is a storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit...

 in the form of RAID 1, RAID 6, and RAID 10. These appliances have a “personality” that allows each to perform either on-premise backup, off-premise disaster recovery, or through a technology known as cross-vaulting (a form of replication

Replication

Replication may refer to:Science* Replication is one of the main principles of the scientific method, a.k.a. reproducibility** Replication , the repetition of a test or complete experiment...

) an appliance may concurrently perform on-premise backup and off-premise disaster recovery. Unitrends also offers a multi-tenant public cloud

Cloud

A cloud is a visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen crystals made of water and/or various chemicals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of a planetary body. They are also known as aerosols. Clouds in Earth's atmosphere are studied in the cloud physics branch of meteorology...

 based service that the company calls “Vault2Cloud.” The company states that Vault2Cloud is based on its previous product offering using its backup appliances to perform off-premise disaster recovery in a single-tenant private cloud deployment methodology.

Technology

Unitrends uses file- and image-based backup techniques coupled with storage-based and in-flight encryption

Encryption

In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information...

, compression

Data compression

In computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....

 and data deduplication

Data deduplication

In computing, data deduplication is a specialized data compression technique for eliminating coarse-grained redundant data. The technique is used to improve storage utilization and can also be applied to network data transfers to reduce the number of bytes that must be sent across a link...

. The technology supports bare-metal restore as well as file-based recovery. Unitrends supports a form of disk staging

Disk staging

Disk staging is using disks as an additional, temporary stage of backup process before finally storing backup to tape. Backups stay on disk typically for a day or a week, before being copied to tape in a background process and deleted afterwards....

 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. The company touts its support of storage, operating system, and application heterogeneity and claims that it supports over 100 versions of operating systems and applications. Unitrends states that it uses a web 2.0

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...

 user interface that allows it to manage from one to hundreds of its appliances in a single pane of glass.

History

Unitrends was founded in 1989 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina by Steve Schwartz. It is currently headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina.

The executive and operational management of Unitrends include:

• Philip Eliot, Chairman

• Michael Coney, CEO

• Mark Campbell, COO

• Russell Holt, Senior Vice President, Business Development

Venture capital groups investing in Unitrends include Paladin Capital Group, The Trelys Funds, The Aurora Funds, and Harbert Venture Partners.