(davecork) 1

Before I start, there will be a TL;DR summary at the bottom.

I just found out that my existing Unitrends support, DRaaS and cloud replication contract will expire in two weeks. In Unitrends’ defense, they did a cursory notification in mid-December about support renewal. I fired back a reply saying that my records showed I was good until March, and never heard a reply. The only reason I didn’t lose my support entirely is because I wanted to be proactive, so I reached out for a quote.

Then came the sticker shock. Three years ago, I purchased a new Unitrends appliance. Included in the purchase price was 3 years of support, 3 years of DRaaS and 3 years of cloud replication. With the new quote my year over year cost increased by roughly 80 percent, and that doesn’t include new hardware!

As a result of this experience, I am completely re-evaluating my relationship with Unitrends… which is too bad, because their product and support have been excellent. I’d love to hear your your suggestions based on my needs, listed below…

TL;DR:

Looking for a backup solution that meets the following needs:

-Local Backup

-Replicates to cloud

-Encrypts backups

-Disaster Recovery as a Service or similar

-Office 365 backup

-Rock solid backups

-Compatible with Hyper-V

9 Spice ups
2

Veeam handles that and if you wish, you can partner with Cloud Connect Partners to backup/replicate to the cloud.

@Veeam_Software

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3

May take a look at Cloudberry and use Amazon as your storage and DR as a service.

@doug-msp360

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4

Acronis Backup 12.5 will fit all the requirements so far:

-Local Backup

-Disaster Recovery as a Service or similar

Let me know if you have any questions.

5

+1 for veeam

6

Dave - First, thanks for choosing Unitrends since 2012! Let me apologize for our failure to get back to you in December. I’m looking into what happened there, but in the meantime, I wanted to go over a few details from your purchase in 2016.

At that time, you literally got the deal of the century. You were able to partake in a special promotion called our Supersize promotion. This included paying the price for the unit of your choice and getting the next size unit at the cost of the smaller unit. In your specific case, you received a Recovery 713S for the price of a Recovery 604. You received further discounts on top of that, which means that you received a $10,249 appliance for $4,999 instead of the list price for that unit of $5,995. You received further discounts on your support costs, saving you over 28% on your 3 year support contract, and even your cloud subscription was discounted. A lot of our customers forget the specifics when they’ve been able to take advantage of special pricing like you were able to. It has been over 3 years for you so that’s completely understandable. Often, it just takes a quick trip down memory lane to realize that they received quite a deal initially, and are only being quoted the current market price for the services they want or need.

With all that being said, I’m happy to reach out to your account manager to ensure that you’ve been quoted correctly, if you’d like. Please let me know how I can help, and thanks again for choosing Unitrends!

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davecork As Merryworks suggested, feel free to take a look at CloudBerry. Our Managed Backup can handle all of your requirements (local and cloud backup) except for “replication”. We don’t offer a true server/vm replication but you can restore image-level backups to Amazon or Azure VMs. Here’s a link to more information: Managed Cloud Backup Service

Please let me know if you have any questions.

@michael9595 @davecork

8

Arcserve UDP is an option that hits all your requirements, too. When I was looking to replace my old backup, they had a demo appliance that blew away the competition.

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Thanks for the Mention Aaron.

Dave,
Arcserve Unified Data Protection does meet all of your requirements and we’d love to show you an in depth demo. Trial versions of UDP can be down loaded at arcserve.com and I’m here to answer any questions you might have.

I’ll also add that having faith in your backup/DR solution is half the battle. You should always keep informed with what else is out there in the market and find the best solution that fits your needs. I understand budget plays into everything and hope that if Arcserve UDP peaks your interest we can win your business first on features and functions and later on budget.

10

Talk with your account manager, and ask for a new quote. As an existing customer, I got great pricing last January at the end of my support agreement.

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If you don’t want to use Unitrends and are looking for an all in one vendor solution with Draas and an appliance I’d consider Datto

@Datto_Inc

12

Katie, I get that I received a great deal in 2016, and do appreciate the reminder. Now in return, do you understand how jacking up the price by 80% is a huge shock to the system? Do you realize how that level of sticker shock is a huge disincentive for customer loyalty? Do you appreciate how giving me two weeks to come to grips with this, and come up with that kind of money, unbudgeted, can be a bit painful?

From my perspective, Unitrends did everything wrong in this renewal quote. They should have told me WELL in advance that I could expect this huge price increase. At least they could have tried to boil the frog instead of shocking it. Really though, my vendor should reward my loyalty, not punish it. I try to form partnerships with my vendors. Partnerships are based on trust and communication. What did this experience do to earn my trust? How and what did this experience communicate to me?

13

Dave - I understand your stance on this, and rather than go back and forth here on the community, where honestly, since I’m not your account manager, I cannot do much more than state the facts, it would be better for you to chat with your account team. I’ve offered to reach out to them to share this information with them and have them review your quote, but never heard back from you. Would you like for me to have them follow up with you?

Also, while we definitely value you and your loyalty, promotional or sale pricing is a discount that is available for a short time and is not the actual price of our solutions. Every customer that gets a discount on something at some point eventually has a renewal, trade-in, or addition of new solutions to their environment at the actual MSRP.

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I do agree that it’s not helpful to go back and forth here on the community. I’m already in the process of working with my support team, but if you think that your input can be beneficial to my cause, then yes, please encourage them to help me out.

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Great! I’m going to follow up with your account team on this for you. Hang tight!

16

Veeam can handle all the stuff you need. Additionally, you can improve backups with the ransomware-proof Virtual Tape Libraries with an additional offload to the cloud. BTW, it’s for free. Virtual Tape Library (VTL) from StarWind

Let me bring you the proper person.

@kirsten-veeam

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Go Veeam. Buy commodity servers with your OS of choice (Linux? To avoid Tax-V) to build a local backup repository. Use B2 for an inexpensive off-site storage.

(this is one of the options on how to build your backup / DR infrastructure)

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+1 to Datto.

Veeam is great but a lot of extra work. You will have to find a channel partner for it, but Datto is on par with and in many ways better than Unitrends.

19

I’d rather backup to literal punch tapes and have to re-key all my data back in in binary than ever have to deal with Datto again. Spent tens of thousands of dollars on a solution that only ever worked once, and halfway at that.

Veeam support hasn’t let me down in the very few cases I’ve needed them so far. And a triple-plus for not being locked into completely unreliable appliances that have more deemed RAM failures in a year than I’ve seen in my entire lifetime elsewhere.

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I was drinking some water when I read this, and definitely somehow got water up my nose because I started laughing at this amazing description :slight_smile:

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