SUMMARY
Customres with Cisco unity telephony systems often enquire how best to use unitrends to protect it.
ISSUE
You have a Cisco Unity Telephony system implemented in your environment and want to be able to recover it after a disaster.
RESOLUTION
Unitrends cannot directly protect a Cisco unity implementation as Cisco itself does not support 3rd party backup providers and does not expose APIs for use.
Unitrends can still collect data Cisco's tools produce, can back up that data, and can make offsite copies of that data, allowing for a level of site disaster prevention and comliance adherence that Cisco's own toold do not provide.
To protect Cisco Unity, Customers must use Cisco's own backup tools per Cisco's documentation. Cisco backups must be exported from unity to an SFTP share the customer manages within their environment.
Information on that process and requirements is published for Unity 8.x here by Cisco. Unitrends advises customers who have unity contact official Cisco support or certified service partners to ensure their Unity implementation is protected in a configuration that Cisco itself will support. This is critical as once unitrends recovers Unity backup data for the customer they would be required to work with Cisco to further recover that information back into a Unity environment. Unitrends cannot assist in managing protecting or recovering the Unity platform directly, we will only assist in making copies and recovering the data created by Cisco through proper use of it;s tools. Unitrends is not responsible to ensure that process is done properly by the customer.
Once the Cisco backups are created in an SFTP share, Unitrends can protect that share using standard backups in the following ways:
- If the SFTP share host is an OS that Unitrends provides an agent to protect, install an agent on that system (not on a unity server) and protect is using bet practice methods.
- If the share server is a VM, ad that server is in a configuration and uses an OS that support VM host level backups, the SFTP host may be protected as a VM
- If the SFTP host is a hardware NAS device, configure an NFS or CIFS share hosting the data placed in the SFTP site directory and configure Unitrends backup to protect that share.