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I’m looking at budgeting a long overdue upgrade to our backup solution.

I really am liking the idea of backup to appliance, with a cloud option and Unitrends and Barracuda seem to fill that space nicely.

Last night I was watching a demo on Unitrends, and admittedly it was late, and I probably need to go back and watch it again, but if I remember correctly, with Unitrends, I can backup a whole VM and then have the option to recover the VM OR a file from the backed up VM?

I really like that idea. What other vendors fit the bill in that regard, or have I just been out of this segment for too long?

Thanks!

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I’m looking into back up option for someone, do you have the link to that video?

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Hi Blain1564,

You won’t go wrong with Unitrends. I’ve worked with many different products throughout my years in IT and I was blown away with Unitrends - have the appliance deployed since last year and it’s been a breath of fresh air.

Last month I had failure with both air conditioners in the main server room, and was receiving alerts on all servers about to shut down due to temperature. I was 200 miles away and this happened in the middle of the night. So had to shut down everything, however, users came in at 9 and everything was up and running thanks to Unitrends (See link http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/481820-panic-is-on-air-conditioning-units-have-just-gone-all-units-overheating )

Unitrends tick all the boxes - Simple but intelligent backups, Excellent Support and great pricing. You should get a trial and see for yourself or ask one of many spiceheads and check reviews - I bet you don’t come across any negative reviews! I’m sure Katie from Unitrends will be on here to tell you more, and if you’ve any questions fire away and I’ll do my best to answer them.

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My last experience with Barracuda was nice, but they are always late in release…

We were in 2013, but we scouldn’t backup our exchange 2013 because it wasn’t supporting windows server 2012 yet…

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I went with Unitrends for a few reasons:
Support for archiving to multiple mediums eg tape or disk
Compression
Instant Recovery was simple.

Barracuda was great and all but they don’t compress. They push their cloud services and the 3 year TCO was 3 times as much as Unitrends in my case.

I’ve found Unitrends support to be fantastic and Barracuda support to be the same. (I have a spam and virus firewall)

My suggestion is to get trials of both. See which works better for you .

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I’m about to do a backup refresh and looking into unitrends and veeam. I’ve got the unitrends virtual appliance and like what I see so far. Need to work out what my backup space I need but leaning towards unitrends at the moment

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What’s your environment like?

  • How many servers?
  • Split of virtual/physical?
  • vSphere or Hyper-V?
  • Total quantity of data?
  • Offsite requirements?

And so on…

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I use a solution called Arkeia Arkeia is owned by Western Digital. They offer physical appliance and Cloud replication also a virtual appliance . They also offer SAAS if your budget is tight. You can do Vm backups and file level backups. They also have an agent that can be used on all platforms (Linux, Windows, Unix, Solaris). The agent uses VSS to connect to Exchange, Sql, Active Directory. The Vm backups are run via your Vcenter Server. You can also backup physical servers. Tape replication and backups are also offered. My opinion is, it is a well designed application for disaster recovery and their support is probably the top reason I stay with this product over all the others.

http://arkeia.com/

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Most of backup applications nowaday can do pretty much the same. Questions are:

  1. What kind of buget you have?

  2. What kind of backup you are looking for? Vm? file level? file server? exchange …

  3. Onsite or offsite?

Best to ask for test out to make sure it deliver what you are expect rather than just watching the demo. I have experience with these and all are deliver what you are looking for

  1. Symantec Backup Exec

  2. Unitrend

  3. Veeam

  4. VRanger

  5. EverSync (formerly Revineix) - this is hardware base and have hardware archive which is pretty great

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Blaine,

If you’re looking for a complete DR solution…you may want to look at Quorum’s award winning Hybrid Cloud solution. An appliance at your local site for HA…rack it and stack it and you’re done. The appliance snapshots, replicates,and dedupes your physical or virtual servers. The applications and the data residing on the servers are protected and backed up to the appliance. The Quorum appliance also creates a virtual environment of your production servers that are ready to run with a single click.

That’s like having a virtual clone of Drew Brees and Jimmy Graham!!! In a typical scenario…Seneca Wallace and Benjamin Watson would come in to replace your starters. A significant drop off if you ask me…

:slight_smile: Back to IT- An appliance at the local site for HA, a 2nd appliance at a different site for DR. It’s entirely up to you…

Quorum also provides Disaster Recovery as a Service. We provide the cloud resource and the cloud component for you in our Data Center. No admin intervention or specialized training is needed to recover your data. It’s the exact same process if you use the local appliance, secondary appliance, or Quorum’s cloud. We focus on the recovery aspect of DR…assured recovery in minutes…and it’s simple!!!

Over 80 reviews and ratings from IT pros just like you…

2013 Spiceworks Award Winner (Best Cloud SaaS Solution) Ranked #1

Feel free to view our vendor page on Spiceworks , download our free demo software for a test drive , or PM any of the Green Guys or Gals for additional info.

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I have to say that Unitrends is hands-down one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It’s simple, it works, and I can recover files, folders, entire databases, entire VMs, and entire physical machines, to name just a few. Their support and customer service are top notch. I know this doesn’t directly answer your question, but I hope it’s helpful information.

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Unitrends is great. We moved to it about 10 months ago, and it has been a real bonus over our old tape based solution. Want a file restored - give me 5 minutes and it’s back. Want a whole VM restored, no problem can do that too. Before unitrends it took several hours just to get the tape back on site!

We didn’t go with the appliance though. We reused some older servers that were being retired from the production environment, got some Synology NAS boxes for storage, and installed the UEB virtual applicance.

For us this worked out cheaper than the appliance based on our usage needs, might be worth considering.

We have 3 instances, one in each live site, and a 3rd at a DR location, which each of the live sites replicate everything to. We can restore from the live site or the DR site.

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Blain - Thanks for considering Unitrends, and for watching our on-demand demo. You can recover an individual file or folder or a whole client using Unitrends. Johnny made a great suggestion to test out any solution that you’re considering before making a final decision. This will not only give you insight into the interface, etc, but should also include access to support, which can play a huge role in which product you choose. To add onto Johnny’s questions from above:

  • What OSs are you protecting?

  • Do you have any feature requirements, like deduplication, encryption, etc?

  • Do you need long term archiving or replication?

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Blain,

I would encourage you to look at Axcient as well. We provide an Appliance based solution (physical or virtual) and can protect any OS running physically or virtually. In addition we give you the ability to run your Windows servers virtually on the appliance or in our cloud. Don’t take my word for it, click Here look what Gartner had to say about Axcient’s ability.

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I’d like to throw in a vote for Quorum. We’ve been with them for over a year now, and it’s a consistently awesome appliance.

In our backup/DR project, we decided that our priority was to get back up and running as quickly as possible (i.e.a short RTO). To that end we needed an appliance that could ideally host one or all of our servers until the primary site/server was back up. That eliminated most solutions out there, but we found that Quorum fit the bill exactly.

Currently, we’re backing up a mix of physical and virtual servers (30 in total) and 5TB of data. The appliance doesn’t take a ton of babysitting or management, and it can do all the standard backup and recovery stuff (file/folder/email restores, dedupe, off site replication etc) in addition to running the servers should they have a hard fail. But, for those more common tasks, it’s a pretty simple process to pull out individual files or emails that one of my many fat-fingered users tend to delete on a regular basis.

There is a lot more to it of course, but if you’re in the market for an appliance, they are worth a serious look.

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Hey Patrick, thanks for the mention! We are proud of our easy-to-execute solution that aims at narrowing your RTO and as Darell mentioned, please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, Blain. We are always happy to help!

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Ask your potential solution provider:

  1. Where is the encryption key stored? If the encryption key is stored on their system then they have access to your data. Maybe not a big deal, but it’s deal killer in a lot of situations.

  2. Does the cloud backup offer just the latest version of files or past versions?

  3. What’s the exit strategy? Say you use a solution for 5 years and then want to look at a new solution. Do you have to maintain expensive maintenance on appliances you no longer use but need to maintain so you can restore a single file from the past?

  4. Appliance vendors will oversize the appliance so you won’t run out of space immediately. This means you are paying a lot up front for unused capacity.

I would encourage you to review the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup. Many of the solutions you are evaluating are no where to be found.

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“I would encourage you to review the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup. Many of the solutions you are evaluating are no where to be found.”

This means absolutely nothing and I would ignore this advice. Not being mentioned in Gartner has no bearing on the product what so ever. How many analysts at Gartner actual use and review the product? NONE! Vendors pay Gartner, and customers of the product are handpicked for reviews. Reliance on Gartner is a sure sign of a weak IT department and often leads them in the totally wrong direction. Stick with the advice from real users within Spiceworks.

Trial various systems yourself and see how it fits in to your environment. I stick with my initial advice - Unitrends!

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I think reliance on Gartner is foolish but similarly I think ignoring it is also foolish - take it with a huge pinch of salt but broadly speaking I’d say it’s right more often than it’s wrong.

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