The Unitrends MAX appliances are targeted at the lower end of the market, providing it with failover capabilities and other capabilities which have not been available previously to these customers.
Today, backup provider Unitrends, a Kaseya company, is announcing its new Unitrends Recovery Series MAX appliances, which is aimed at MSPs and distributed locations of organizations, to provide them with a complete data recovery environment.
The MAX name here is not intended to signify a high-performance appliance overall. It is a high-performance appliance specifically for the low end of the market, which provides capabilities that previously had only been available higher upmarket. It also represents what the company sees as a natural evolution of its product offerings.
Unitrends started selling direct, added a channel component in 2013, and moved to a 100 per cent channel model in 2015.
“Back then, our market was heavily SMB focused – the Backup Exec world,” said Joe Noonan, Unitrends’ vice president product management and marketing. “We displaced that with an appliance-based approach. Since 2015 we have moved upstream a lot into the midmarket and the small enterprise. We still have customers with 50 employees and less, but between 100 and 500 is the true sweet spot, and our growth in 1000-plus employee companies has been large as well.”
The MSP business really only took off after Unitrends entered into an OEM relationship with Kaseya, which was followed shortly after by Kaseya acquiring Unitrends and maintaining it as a separate company within Kaseya.
“Our MSP business was very, very small before that,” Noonan said. “We spun out Unitrends MSP as a subsidiary to go after the MSP market, and that was the best thing that we did. Before that, we had never invested much in that segment, and were tied to the VAR and DMR channel. It’s now the fastest growing part of our business, and even though that’s based off smaller numbers, it’s still impressive.”
Last year, Unitrends announced a major redo of their flagship lineup.
“We launched our Gen 8 products, which expanded our flagship appliances to 15 models,” Noonan indicated. “This provided a better TCO focus because others forced people to underbuy or oversize. Still, Gen 8 didn’t compete at the low end. We were pretty skinny there, because cost was such as important factor. Barracuda is our primary competitor and price is important. We didn’t have the resources to run failover applications at the low end because of the low-cost focus. This is where MAX comes in, in both MSP and distributed environments, where they have not had the infrastructure for local recovery. They can now use MAX to fail over to our local box.”
Unitrends Recovery Series MAX is a series of three appliances, available in configurations for both the Unitrends brand and the Unitrends MSP brand. They are specifically designed for organizations that lack local recovery infrastructure, where outages now force more complex remote recoveries. These appliances have up to 300 per cent more compute capacity, and up to eight times more memory than products typically aimed at this part of the market. In addition to high performance backup and recover, they are designed to host fail-over applications and run sandboxes for software testing.
Joe Noonan, Unitrends’ vice president product management and marketing
“Out of the gate, we expect to see more adoption on the MSP side,” Noonan said. “That is the big driver for demand. So many MSPs have customers where they don’t have the local infrastructure, but there is demand in SMB and even the midmarket for remote sites, where they don’t have the capability to back up there. We have a very large customer in France with 4000 appliances remotely. Recovery Series MAX provides local failover for those that don’t have this capability themselves.”
Every Unitrends Recovery MAX comes with Intel Xeon D-1541 processors, built-in, dual 1GB and 10GB Ethernet ports, 128GB SSD cards, and 32 or 64GB of memory. Storage options include 2, 4 or 8TB of usable capacity. All of the Unitrends Recovery Series backup and recovery functionality is included in Recovery MAX, including automatic ransomware detection, WAN optimization technologies such as global adoptive deduplication, encryption and bandwidth throttling, and 24X7 coverage by Unitrends customer support.
