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Just want to warn everyone here that Unitrends is on the verge of releasing Generation 9 appliances. The quick start and racking documentation is already available on their knowledge base. Here is one example:

It looks like they are leaving Supermicro behind and moving to Dell OEM hardware for the physical appliances moving forward.

Of course the sales reps didn’t mention this when I reached out for pricing on a new appliance three weeks ago. Now I’m super excited about that shiny new instantly outdated Generation 8 appliance in my rack.

Buyer beware.

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Well we just got a quote for “renewing” support on our 824 appliance that for a single year was 5 figures … needless to say director shot that right down. No good customer discount … instead a 30% markup … I was like we already have the hardware … this is 1, count with me … 1, uno … year of support, over 5 figures. Yeah thanks but no.

@cliffhastings0133

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The irony is that either I missed it or they literally updated their site while I was writing this post but all the specs for the new Generation 9 appliances are on their site. It looks like they are completely changing their pricing model to fully subscription based and you get the hardware for free as part of your subscription. List prices are here:

The deal I got was the 8016S for free if i paid three years of support up front. Which coincidentally seems to be their new pricing model anyway.

If I’m being honest though, with an 824 aren’t you looking to upgrade the hardware anyway? I bet you could get a brand new appliance for not much more than that quote for 1 year of support.

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I moved to their virtual appliances so I control the hardware. This year I upgraded from a R610 with 48 x 10K 2.8 TB SAS drives in two RAID 6 groups to a T640 with 24 x 7.68 QLC SSD in RAID 6. Much faster, and I only paid for the hardware. :slight_smile:

Maybe with the switch to Dell, Unitrends will stop using desktop class drives. Even worse, last drive that failed was 5400 RPM in our original physical appliance. We replaced it with a proper enterprise drive since the unit is long out of support.

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It will be interesting to see what kind of pricing you get on your software only renewal since the hardware is free now. I had seen several posts regarding your backup upgrade but I had no idea you were still a Unitrends customer, I figured you had moved on to Veeam like most others.

How are you getting backup copy sets off the T640? Hot or Cold Backup copies to another location?

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Also, I have a 8016S and this is the disk model they used for the capacity drives: ST8000NM000A-2KE101

Looks like it’s a Seagate Enterprise SATA drive, so I’m pretty sure they stopped the practice of using desktop drives a bit ago.

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