Dell released AppAssure 5.4 this week, adding expanded support and new features to its disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) and data protection solutions portfolio. According to the company, AppAssure 5.4 addresses the growing need within the channel to protect business-critical data and applications while giving customers more functionality.

“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,” said Srinidhi Vardarajan, general manager, Data Protection, Dell Software, in a prepared statement. “With AppAssure, users can protect data continuously, move data anywhere, and, when the time comes, recover everything and recover it quickly.”

The latest version of AppAssure features several notable selling points, including enhanced replication, optimized performance and reporting and expanded platform support. With version 5.4, users will have more control and flexibility when architecting their data protection environments, and will also be able to utilize multi-hop replication capabilities. A streamlined management experience and new graphical interface are also included, as well as the ability to run the software on systems including VMware ESX 5.5, Oracle VirtualBox, and CentOS 6.5, according to the press release.

With AppAssure 5.4, Dell said it is looking to address the increasingly demanding disaster recovery needs of the MSP community. The release of AppAssure coincides with Dell’s recent push to capture the attention of MSPs, including a new selection of sales tools and training materials. AppAssure 5.4 is available now either directly through Dell or through its channel partners.