(Paul Hanesana) 1

Hi Everyone,
I’m the Systems Admin for my company and pretty new, but we (I.T Manager and myself) plan to get a backup solution for the company.

Right now, we have about 100-200 computer systems and couple file servers. Any suggestions or messaging me would be helpful as the summer is almost over and we need to get back in I.T mode. :slight_smile:

Thanks in Advanced!

Paul

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Paul - Are you looking primarily for workstation backups, or server backups? If workstation, are all of your workstations always in the networks, or are there any remote employees?

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Unitrends is by far going to be your best backup solution. What kind of environment do you have? Virtual? Physical? Mix of the two? If you have an ESXi server or a Hyper-V server, you can try their UEB NFR for free and see how you like it. Ping me if you have any other questions. Katie will chime in here I’m sure. She’ll be able to help as well. But Unitrends is definitely the clear cut winner IMHO.

Thanks,

A.J.

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Katie,
Yes, primarily workstations, and about 2-5 server backups. The workstations are always on the network, and we don’t have any remote users, except for the ones in another city.

We also have a couple of VM’s running on ESXi.

Btw, how did you create your Avatar, I want to put my doggie in there too!!!

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Get the UEB NFR and load that on your ESXi server and try it out. If you have any questions about getting it setup, feel free to ping me. :slight_smile:

Thanks,

A.J.

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She beat you to it! =P

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Paul, I just moved my company to a Unitrends solution and could not be happier. Even with some of my older, physical equipment setup was a breeze and the management stellar. Yes there are other systems, but after running figures for several different offers I found Unitrends to not only make sense from a feature standpoint but also from a cost standpoint.

I’d say PM me if you want to dive into specifics, but you’ll need to get your forum level up a notch before you can use that system.

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Is it the Free ESXi? Free ESXi isn’t supported.

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Wrong. ESXi free will support the UEB VM and then you simply treat the VMs as physical machines and it works no problem. I have that here at home and it works like a charm.

Thanks,

A.J.

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Even with Free VMWare you can still do Bare-Metal and File-level backups. Since we’re looking at file server that would probably suffice, though with Paid VMWare it is so much more fun.

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Paul - It does sound like Unitrends would fit your needs for a few reasons:

  • No per client fees
  • Protects a heterogeneous environment from a single solution
  • All features are included

You can use Unitrends to protect ESXi (including the free version), you’ll just have to treat these clients as a physical machine vs a VM since VMware hasn’t opened the APIs to any backup solution to protect these VMs.

An artist created this avatar for me, but I originally used a WeeMee as my avatar.

WeeMee-_Katie.jpg

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Sounds good, I’m happy to see everyone here is satisfied with it and seems easy to use. I will download it and build it on my ESXi, and go from there.

This is my first time being in charge of backups moving from Desktop Support to Systems Admin. I’ve always had an network engineer and servers manager to back me up and brainstorm, but here is just me and my I.T Manager and he also is moving to another position outside of I.T :frowning:

Bare with me as I give updates of where I’m at. I guess for starters I will download the software!

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Download the software and get a free t-shirt (if there are still supplies). Unitrends is running a promo right now.

http://community.spiceworks.com/lg/ueb_free_trial

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Thanks. I just downloaded the software from the link you provided, and creating my VM now for it. What server version are you using?

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You know what, there are no stupid questions, but I just answered my own by reading the Manual book like any tech would have.

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Paul - You may want to check out our video tutorials as well.

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Also, check out the Administrator’s Guide in the HTML version. Much easier to navigate than the PDF.

Thanks,

A.J.

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Hi Paul,

If you are looking into backup solutions, I would suggest taking a look at Quorum.

We serve Mid-Market companies who are looking for backup and instant recovery but are on a limited budget. We commonly protect, Exchange, SharePoint, AD, and any critical application with a SQL database.

The Quorum onQ solution takes snapshots of the applications and data on your physical and virtual production servers and creates recovery nodes in a virtual environment that are accessed within minutes following a local outage or disaster.

Once your users access the recovery nodes they resume business, with full services, and you can go back and fix the problem with the production environment in a non-crisis situation.

Quorum approaches backup and recovery similar to Axcient, Unitrends, AppAssure; though, Quorum has unique architectural advantages that are critical to testing and performance.

I would welcome the opportunity to speak with you should have questions.

Kind regards,

Joe

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This is a great post. This was talked about in another thread but you acknowledged your competition, didn’t bash them but stated why you feel your product is superior. I’d be curious just what makes your product different just based on this post just for my own curiousity. PM me if you want.

Thanks,

A.J.

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Chiming in here. We use Unitrends as a virtual instance backing up to a NAS and the product does the job. Set it and forget it is probably the best part about it. If you do see where backups fail through your daily emailed reports, it is probably time to run an update for the Unitrends software which is painless as well.

Having used backup exec previously on many environments, I have found Unitrends to be more reliable and far easier to use.

Michael

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