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Unitrends UVB 8.0 Can Back Up, Restore vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer

Formerly known as PHD Virtual Backup, it's the product of the Unitrend acquisition of PHD last year.

• By Keith Ward
• 07/31/2014

Backup and disaster recovery (DR) vendor Unitrends has released a virtual appliance that it says has a unique place in the market as the only virtual appliance that can back up hypervisors from three of the industry's biggest players: VMware Inc., Microsoft and Citrix Systems Inc.

One can think of Unitrends Virtual Backup (UVB) 8.0 as the next version of PHD Virtual Backup. Unitrends announced the acquisition of PHD Virtual Technologies last December, and UVB represents the first fruits of that purchase. UVB 8.0 can perform backup and recovery up to 20 times faster than competing solutions, the company claimed in a press release, while using 66 percent less storage space and sucking down 75 percent fewer resources.

Senior Product Manager Joe Noonan told Virtualization Review that UVB 8.0 is distinct from its competition in its ability to back up vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer in one environment. It can back up and archive to attached virtual disks, CIFS or NFS shares, as well as public cloud storage, like Amazon S3. UVB provides both on-premises and off-premises backup; for on-premises protection, it uses hypervisor snapshots.

UVB 8.0 is more than just a re-branding of PHD Virtual Backup. Unitrends stated in a press release that more than 140 enhancements were made to the product, including a redesigned UI. A blog entry by Neeshan Peters, an infrastructure engineer and VMware subject matter expert, called the new UI a big change: "The most recent version of the software is quite a transformation. It is a dramatic leap in visual, function and setup ease. This leap is the distance measured between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 or an old Nokia and the first iPhone," he said. (Unitrends provided the link to the blog entry).

UVB 8.0 is aimed at small to midsize businesses, Noonan said, and is available through direct sales, as well as resellers. Prices start at $625 for two sockets. In addition, it can also be part of the Unitrends Certified Recovery Suite, a bundled software package for one inclusive price.