AI for backup management

Unitrends has launchedUnitrends Helix, a self-healing SaaS remediation platform powered by AI that monitors and automatically fixes the most common issues facing IT administrators when managing backups.

Existing backup tools have become more complex as providers attempt to design solutions to reduce failed backups. Unfortunately, this means that IT administrators now have to spend more time simply managing their backup solution — and the added complexity of these tools doesn’t necessarily mean more successful backups, as many of these backups still fail. A consumption gap has emerged in which IT administrators pay for backup capabilities they’ll never fully utilise for a product that requires too much time to manage.

Unitrends is the only existing suite of backup and recovery solutions that offer easy-to-use, all-in-one backup appliances that simplify data protection, application spin-up, SLA policy automation, and Disaster Recovery as a Service. With Helix, Unitrends users can more confidently ensure their backups succeed and free up their time for more innovative or revenue-building initiatives.

“Most existing products leave it to IT administrators to manually monitor, detect and remediate conditions that impact backups, so many IT teams find that they will spend nearly half their day on administrative tasks like this,” said Mike Sanders, general manager of Unitrends. “This clearly isn’t a smart use of their time, especially when resources are already stretched in the current environment. Helix automates these tasks so our customers can focus on important ones, making it the only product on the market to actually solve the problem instead of becoming part of it.”

Helix is a pre-configured add-on to the Recovery Series and Unitrends Backup appliances. It is built to evolve quickly and learn more use cases and common problems to remediate.

“The extensibility of the Unitrends Helix platform to adapt and learn new conditions is a major driver of its value,“ Sanders said. “By automatically fixing issues with backup and recovery, we can enable more important work done on behalf of our customers.”

The Helix agent also regularly checks for service-related issues in Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS), a critical set of services for all backup vendors, and sends reports to the user if it finds and remediates any issues through service restarts.

Helix uses AI to power the following capabilities:

• Monitoring: Helix catches issues as they happen by monitoring users’ backup server and assets. It looks at the configurations of their assets before the backup runs to determine the likelihood of failure, meaning fewer failed backups and quicker remediations for those that do. Additionally, Helix tracks the real-time statuses of users’ backed-up devices, which allows their Unitrends solution to quickly and proactively react to impending failures.
• Remediation: Helix targets problems within a protected guest operating system, such as disk space issues, network connectivity problems and the many things that can go wrong with VSS. Not only are these services critical to maintain for data protection, but they are also the most commonly reported root causes of backup and recovery failures. Future versions of Helix will also intelligently increase Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and automate recoveries after certain failure conditions.
• Maintenance: Helix assists with automated maintenance of users’ backup infrastructure, meaning they can automatically keep their appliances up to date with no added effort on their part. Helix applies these updates intelligently to ensure they run during optimal upgrade times.