I associate Retrospect as an end-point backup solution and have the Dantz brand attached in my head. I am about a decade out of date on both the product and the company. After a changing ownership a few times (including EMC and Roxio ownership), Retrospect is now owned by StorCentric, along with Drobo, Vexata, and Nexsan. Retrospect is now able to protect servers as well as end-point devices such as laptops and desktops as well as use public cloud as a destination and a SaaS management console. This month Retrospect announced new versions of both their Retrospect Backup and Retrospect Virtual products. JG Heithcock briefed me about both the company and the updates. StorCentric has assembled a portfolio of storage from high-end NVMe all-flash to SMB focussed, with Retrospect in the SMB data protection category.
One of the key new features in both Retrospect Backup 17, and Retrospect Virtual 2020 is the simple onboarding, essentially a single, Internet-accessible, URL for deploying a pre-configured agent and license. Simple onboarding is essential for end-point protection, where a laptop may never connect to the corporate LAN and so cannot get easily get updates from the on-premises corporate servers. For on-premises resources such as servers and desktops, the simple onboarding can integrate with your chosen software deployment tool.
I like the SaaS console to manage across multiple Retrospect servers, although complete management is still available at each server. The web console provides a holistic view of your data protection status for the entire organization. I also like that restores can happen from local storage on the Retrospect server or from lower-cost storage on a public cloud. Licensing is flexible, either a monthly subscription covering all version updates or a perpetual license for a specific version.
You can also read what Dan Frith wrote about the Retrospect announcement.
© 2020, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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