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I have seen this conversation in a few older postings, but was hoping to get a more up-to-date point of view since I’m sure both products have improved over the years. I’m looking to drop Symantec BE for good. I’ve sucked it up for the past 5 years expecting better results in the new versions to compete both functionality and price … neither of which they have done.

I’m looking for a solution that will do local backups (MS Data, SQL, Exchange) then replicate offsite for DR. When I say offsite, I don’t mean cloud - my company will not distribute any data into any cloud outside of our firewall. I have a colo site with a 10mb metro P2P connection that I can use.

So far, I’ve liked the Unitrends and Barracuda solutions. Looking for experiences and if anybody had negatives/positives to share to help with my decision. Open to other products as long as it doesn’t involve public clouds but will do replication.

Thanks in advance!

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Chris - I know that you’re looking for answers from fellow IT Pros, but if you have any technical questions I can answer for you about Umitrends, please let me know.

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Take a look at www.storagecraft.com . I have used them for years.

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We just went though looking at the same products at the beginning of the year, so keep in mind some features may have changed… Barracuda only backs up to its local storage, so if you are planning on using a separate SAN/NAS or other non cloud storage it was not possible. We also trialed Unitrends and the one downside we had was that you could not do file level backups for Exchange or some other portion of the Exchange backup, I can’t remember exactly at the moment. There was a separate product that was needed to do that type of backup.

We ended up going with Veeam, which works for us because we are completely virtual. Those are the only 3 I have looked at recently. We could easily have used either product, they both seemed very functional. In the end it came down to just that 1 item for each product. Hope it helps.

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Ken5817 - I did look at that and it seems like they have the “module” approach. It just looked like I would spend a fortune on licensing costs because I would need bits and pieces of the software. How do you use it?

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In my company we currently use Veeam which is a great product that can be used locally and offsite to non cloud storage. I use it for both. Keep in mind Veeam does not support physical servers only virtual. It also does not support direct iscsi connections inside to virtual machine. The iscsi connection has to be done through the virtual host. With this product recovery time is a bit longer for my setup it takes me about 4 hours to recover all of my servers.

We have also been doing a lot of talking and testing with unitrends. I love this solution for the fact it is an all in one solution that does backups replication and instant recoveries in one appliance. Steer clear of the software solution. Also there is no per machine licensing once you by the appliance you can add as many servers as you want. However this solution has the largest price tag.

If price is not an option i like unitrends but if it is veeam is a good alternative but it requires a bit more time to manage.

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Why do you say that?

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I just know that software solution does not support as much as the appliance such as instant recovery for hyper-v virtual machines which is what we run but the appliance will support instant recovery.

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In the debate over an appliance or a software solution, why not have the option for both? In most SMB’s the appliance is useful because it’s self-contained and “should” provide an out-of-the-box solution. It’s also typically more expensive than the build-your-own solution and an appliance has other limits that impede growth. For example, an appliance has limited drive space and compute resources which can limit your ability to create new VMs.

The simple truth is you can have both. Whether you plan to build your own solution using software and your hardware, or you plan to take advantage of the simplicity and ease-of-maintenance an appliance offers, you deserve to choose what best fits your business needs. We have strategic partners (WD, Kaseya, Datto, etc) that build appliances for resale to their customers using our software. We have MSP’s that use our software to build their own BDR on their own hardware. Having the freedom to choose is powerful.

Cheers!

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Unfortunately, that isn’t completely true. We offer VirtualBoot (instantly spin up a backup image as a VM), HeadStart Restore (pre-stage VMs for migration and/or failover purposes) and the power to natively convert your backup images to VHDX/VMDK formats to run on the platform of your choice. This software solution easily supports instant recovery for VMs to multiple hypervisor platforms, including: Hyper-V, VMware, Citrix XenServer, Oracle VirtualBox, and RedHat KVM.

Cheers

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I’ve looked at Storagecraft and it just seems like it follows the “nickel and dime” licensing that I hated with Symantec.

Does anybody use it who can talk about it?

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Chris,

I understand you’d like peer reviews to answer this question. If you’re interested in my response, please feel free to contact me directly.

Cheers!

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I use Yosemite Server Backup from Barracuda, and I’m quite happy with them. However, I also run a mixed environment with 50/50 Windows/Linux servers.

YSB supports backups and disaster recover for Linux, VMware hosts, and Windows (including Windows 8 and Server 2012). They support backups to disk, tape, and nas, however as one person mentioned, the nas has to be mapped as a local drive, so I use iscsi for my offsite connection. They also allow backups to unlimited servers as well as including backup agents for SQL/Exchange/VMware free of charge.

I get consistently good throughput readings and my full backups are about 1.4TB.

The only downside is that some systems, like Server 2003, require the restore data (disc or tape) to be connected directly to the host in order to perform disaster recovery, otherwise you have to add a new operating system and client, and manually restore drives and system state. The same holds true for the SQL and Exchange agents, you have to restore the server from Disaster Recovery, and then you need to restore the databases. I figure that’s a pretty minimal cost though, and the upfront pricing is hard to beat.

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SD_GS500E - does it do deduplication or some type of compression? Do you do offsite backups over a WAN connection?

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yes, it supports both hardware and software compression as well as encryption. It fits our 1.4TB onto two LTO 3 drives.

I also do weekly backups to an offisite NAS that includes just our core data, and then I do disk to tape for full weekly/monthly/yearly backups and rotate the tapes to a different offsite location. The offsite backups are much slower, but I think that is more related to the T1 connection that has a max of 1.5 MB/sec.

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Thanks for considering Unitrends Frank! I did want to clarify how we protect Exchange. Application aware Exchange protection is included in every Unitrends instance, however, if you need the ability to granularly restore individual emails, then we partner with Kroll On-track for this feature. This is the only additional cost that you would incur, but this add-on is completely licensed & supported by Unitrends. Since this is not our own product, we feel that it’s important to let our current & prospective customers know that this is not ours, but you will never have to work with anyone outside of Unitrends for this product, nor will you be billed separately.

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Interestingly enough … I talked to a Unitrends rep and he mentioned that the barracuda will not let you log into it’s web platform if it cannot ping the barracuda network’s servers. So … if you have a disaster that takes out your Internet connection, you are SOL? That’s a deal breaker in my eyes.

Can anybody confirm this?

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What kind of costs?

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It’s licensed based upon the number of mailboxes you want to protect, in 50 mailbox increments. I haven’t looked at a price list recently, but I believe that it starts around $500. Unless you need to add protection for more mailboxes, this is a one time purchase.

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Unitrends definitely has the community momentum over Barracuda. Barracuda took a huge hit when they were discovered having opened secret backdoors with set passwords exposing their systems to anymore.

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