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Unitrends Software DPUs Certified With Sony SAIT Tape Drives

Unitrends Software Corp announced it has certified its full line of integrated Data Protection Units (DPUs) and software for use with Sony Electronics' SAIT drives and media.

The announcement means firms now have more options than ever before to protect their corporate-critical data by implementing a true disk-to-disk-to-tape strategy. Increasingly, most industry analysts now agree that disk-to-disk-to-tape is a preferred method for companies to obtain the benefits of disk-to-disk backup while maintaining the true benefits of tape. Unitrends DPUs enable firms to backup to disk and also simply attach tape drives, such as Sony SAIT, making it easy to create a copy of important data for off-site archiving.

"Increasingly, firms need the powerful performance, reliability and cost efficiencies that Sony's SAIT technology provides," said Alan Sund, director of tape storage marketing for Sony Electronics' Component Solutions Business Division. "Unitrends has demonstrated their ability to deliver such solutions to their target SMB market segment. By certifying SAIT technology with their DPUs and software, Unitrends enables true disk-to-disk-to-tape data protection, allowing companies to more easily meet their archiving requirements, both safely and securely."

Unitrends' software, which includes both standard backup/restore and "bare metal" capabilities, comes bundled in every new DPU, now in its third generation. Together, the two provide small and mid-sized companies with as much as 100 terabytes of disk-based storage, allowing them to rapidly scale to meet their needs. Companies of all sizes, both public and private, face an increasing myriad of government regulations requiring them to secure and archive data; the combination of Unitrends' DPUs and SAIT tape drives gives these firms economical options to meet those requirements.

"Unitrends DPUs provide the benefit of true disk-to-disk-to-tape data protection, including parallel disk-to-disk backup and restore, indexing, automatic data purging, hardware compression and full utilization of an active CPU, along with the archiving power of tape with selective transfer of archive data from disk-to-tape in an intelligent fashion," said Greg Poole, Unitrends' vice-president of sales. "Certifying that it will work seamlessly with Sony's SAIT drives and media provides our customers with an additional level of assurance.

"SAIT was initially designed to meet the storage needs of large firms; today's small and mid-sized companies now need its power and capacity, making it a natural fit with our line of products," Poole continued. "By blending our software with data storage and the ability to fully utilize tape, Unitrends' data protection solution prevents data from becoming stale; it is always kept alive, compact, point-in-time presentable, and also available as an archival copy, if needed."