Dell Software today announced the launch of AppAssure™ 5.4, the latest version of the company’s all-in-one backup, replication and disaster recovery software solution. As organizations are tasked with protecting an ever-growing volume of business-critical data and applications, the need for modern backup and recovery solutions that eliminate prolonged periods of downtime is more important than ever. The release of AppAssure 5.4 meets this customer demand and further enhances Dell Software’s complete portfolio of innovative and disruptive data protection solutions, which empower customers to match their backup and recovery implementations to their specific business needs.
AppAssure 5.4 features numerous upgrades designed to improve replication, optimize performance and reporting, and broaden platform support, delivering a simplified user experience that meets the modern data protection needs of both customers and managed service providers (MSPs). Key new capabilities include:

• Enhanced replication – A host of replication enhancements give users more control and flexibility when architecting their data protection environment. AppAssure 5.4 features multi-target and multi-hop replication capabilities, allowing users to replicate backup data from a single AppAssure core server to multiple target servers. This is particularly useful for organizations and service providers implementing a multi-tier disaster recovery strategy. The new release also includes the ability to set multiple retention policies, which means users can set one policy for onsite data and a longer retention policy for data at an offsite location.
  • Other notable new replication features include scheduled replication that enables users to set customized replication schedules for each target, and advanced replication throttling, which lets users limit the speed of replication in bandwidth-constrained environments.
• Optimized performance and reporting – A series of upgrades provide new and existing users with a more streamlined management experience. AppAssure 5.4 features a new graphical user interface that provides quick access to the most commonly used areas of the product. The new release also offers dynamic deduplication cache sizing, which simplifies the configuration process and guarantees optimal performance by automatically selecting the ideal dedupe cache size based on available memory. Additional upgrades include protection schedule templates, nightly mount checks, and reduced memory consumption.
• Expanded platform support – AppAssure 5.4 delivers support for a wide range of critical systems including VMware ESX 5.5, Oracle VirtualBox, UEFI, RHEL 6.5, and CentOS 6.5.

Meeting the Needs of MSPs As a growing number of companies turn to experienced MSPs to meet their disaster recovery needs, Dell Software is committed to delivering the capabilities those MSPs need to provide successful disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). The launch of AppAssure 5.4 is the latest example of Dell’s focus on delivering data protection solutions for the MSP community. Already ideal for DRaaS because of its block-level backup and virtual standby capabilities, AppAssure 5.4 further empowers MSPs to manage customers’ backup environments with numerous replication, reporting and management enhancements. In addition, Dell Software now offers a variety of sales tools and training materials tailored specifically for the MSP community; and, as evidence of the company’s continued momentum in the space, MSPs including Accelerite (formally Persistent System’s rCloud), JMK Solutions, Synesis International and Intelice Solutions all recently have become partners. Availability AppAssure 5.4 is available now both direct from Dell and through the channel.
Quotes
Srinidhi Vardarajan, general manager, Data Protection, Dell Software “Modern data protection is about ensuring that critical data and applications can be quickly recovered in the event of an outage or corruption. Prolonged downtime simply isn’t acceptable. That means customers and MSPs not only need solutions that are fast, scalable and reliable, they also need the flexibility to build a program based on the specific recovery needs of their businesses and clients. The release of AppAssure 5.4 is the latest example of how Dell Software’s robust portfolio of data protection solutions gives them just that. With AppAssure, users can protect data continuously, move data anywhere, and, when the time comes, recover everything and recover it quickly.”