1

Has anyone here ever had issues with Unitrends Replication or Vault-to-Cloud services on a consistent basis?

We have been having issues since August 2013, which still have not gone resolved. To their credit, we have been working with their technicians and engineers, but every solution we are presented has not fixed the overarching issues we have been dealing with.

After speaking with various technicians and engineers over the year with various solutions (upgrading the appliance OS, reseeding nearly 3-5 times in the year to troubleshoot the issue, having the appliance crash because of replication holding onto backups), I’m starting to have my doubts about this product and the service. I would like to say, if replication was not an issue for us, their backup solution does a good job at least.

4 Spice ups
2

Grey - I’m sorry that you’re having these issues, but glad to hear that you’re in touch with our support team. The vast majority of our Unitrends Cloud users are happy with the service, but that’s not to say that everyone’s experience has been flawless. If you’d like me to look into your case(s) to see if there is any further escalation that can be done, please forward over your case number(s) or asset tag information. Again, my apologies that your experience is not what you had hoped it would be.

3

We’ve had 3 big Vault-2-Cloud failures in the last month.

On the first failure the vault had problems and Unitrends moved us to a vault in another datacenter. We had to resync everything from zero.

On the second failure one drive on the vault went bad along with some other unknown problems. The vaulting jobs were stopped. We weren’t proactively notified of the failures, we weren’t called back as promised, … Eventually Unitrends got the jobs running again and everything synced up.

I’m still dealing with the third failure. Cause yet unknown. This case has been escalated.

4

Jon - I’m sorry to hear that you had these issues. I want to check into this situation for you. Can you PM me your asset tag or case number so that I can ensure that your cases have been properly escalated?

5

Katie, thanks for the escalation offer. I am satisfied with the escalation level for now. If that changes, I will let you know.

This last failure was escalated to L2 and has been resolved. Once again there was hardware failure on Unitrends’ end that caused the vaulting jobs to fail. That’s three hardware failures on Unitrends’ end within a month that resulted in vaulting jobs stopping.

We expect hardware failures, which is why we backup. We also know that hardware failure can result in performance degradation (RAID rebuild, etc…). However, loss of service is a different matter. It is difficult to accept that Unitrends, a backup and DR company, is not better prepared to handle these failures.

I was told that Unitrends is addressing general reliability issues. We will have to wait and see…

6

I don’t think there are any uptime guarantees or financial penalties for Vault2Cloud. Katie, is that correct?

7

Jon - Unfortunately, your case is quite an exception to our normal users’ experience. The support agreement that we have for all Cloud customers is that we are  "responsible for configuring, monitoring, and trouble-shooting the Unitrends Cloud customer operations and managing the replicated data in the cloud. This is done proatively & reactively from initial configuration, to day-to-day monitoring including failure troubleshooting." There are SLAs associated with getting your data back to you in the event of a disaster at your site, but we expect no downtime on our end, so there are no SLAs in regards to our uptime. If you’d like to discuss this with us, or provide us with some feedback as to how you think that we can change this policy, please let me know.

8

Jon - I spoke with the engineer who has your case, and while we don’t have any financial penalties outlined in our support contract with you, we issued you a one month credit for your cloud fees last week as a gesture of good will. Also, I understand that we are working on migrating you to our updated cloud platform over the next few weeks. If these actions aren’t to your satisfaction, please let me know so that we can meet your expectations.

9

Katie - thanks for checking on my case. My case may be an exception, but it’s not unique. My understanding is that the other users on the same vault experienced job failures as well. The OP still has problems with Unitrends replication. I’m on hold for now until I see how the cloud platform holds up.

10

Jon - I’m sorry that you’re not satisfied with your Vault2Cloud experience. If there’s anything that we can do to improve your level of satisfaction, please let us know. As far as the OP’s issue, it is my understanding that his case has been escalated and is moving toward a resolution.

11

We too are having problems with our Unitrends Recovery 813 appliances and Replication. Prior to a disk crash last month we had been vaulting flawlessly. Unitrends support said we should be replicating and vaulting is on the way out.Faith in backups but no faith in vaulting. We have had no reliable data offsite for a motnh and a half now. 1.7 TB total data. Lucky we are not a big shop, but big enough.

12

Greg - I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been having these issues. Can you private message me your contact details so that I can look into your case(s)?

13

I’ve had this issue since around December as well. Things seem to finally be moving, but now it’s a waiting game since everything is so back-logged.

14

James - I’m sorry to hear that you were affected by this as well. If you’d like for me to look into your cases, please PM me your contact information.

15

Same problems here. Inconsistent replications even had one server that didnt get a replication to cloud for the entire year even after seeding. And today i noticed that 2 critical servers (SQL and Exchange) no longer have disaster recovery full backups in the cloud. Gone…just disappeared over the weekend. If i had to produce a disaster recovery for these machines today, i wouldnt have a job tomorrow.