What is Unitrends ReliableDR and what is it used for?

Unitrends ReliableDR is disaster recovery (DR) testing software based on technology gained from the company's acquisition of virtual backup specialist PHD Virtual in 2013. ReliableDR had been added to PHD Virtual's product lineup with its purchase of VirtualSharp nine months earlier.

ReliableDR is designed to manage DR testing, failover and failback for virtual machines (VMs). It offers automated and ongoing testing of users' DR processes to meet recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

ReliableDR uses replication to move data to a secondary site.

ReliableDR is a feature of Unitrends Certified Recovery Suite. This suite is licensed on a per-socket and per-server basis and includes Unitrends Enterprise Backup, Unitrends Virtual Backup and ReliableDR. It also can be purchased as an integrated software add-on for Unitrends Enterprise Backup and Unitrends Virtual Backup for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Standalone ReliableDR software for VMware environments is also available.

ReliableDR uses replication to move data to a secondary site and works with array-based replication applications from DataCore, Dell, EMC, FalconStor, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and NetApp. It also offers host-based replication.

The software is installed at a user's secondary site or on a Unitrends cloud. Users define the VMs to be tested and set RPOs and RTOs for each application running on VMs. Application-level tests are then configured to verify whether failover can be performed successfully.

The software takes snapshots of replicated VMs, which are then presented to the secondary site hypervisor and restored to a network-isolated environment. The predefined tests mentioned above are then executed. Following each test, which typically is performed hourly, Unitrends ReliableDR stores successfully tested jobs that met RPOs as Certified Recovery Points that can be failed over to during a service outage. In the event of an outage, users log into the ReliableDR interface and right-click "Failover" to initiate the failover process. The software also offers a monitoring/reporting dashboard to track recovery results.