1

We’re looking to update our backup strategy, so we’re researching different vendors. I’ve been first assigned Unitrends to research.

Whatever solution we come up with will need to be an appliance, and preferably can replace Symantec for our tape backup as well.

So, I’m looking for honest, professional discussion about the strengths and weaknesses users have had with with both the product and with the support.

19 Spice ups
2

Can you give some information on what you are backing up? How much? Virtual or Physical? SQL/Exchange/AD? RTO/RPO? All these things come into play.

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3

Honestly I really don’t have any negatives to talk about when it comes to Unitrends. Its pretty easy to use and manage. The appliances are Linux based and are rock solid. You can even spin up your backups in an isolated area to test and make sure everything works. And if you get several appliances you can manage them all from one console. They backup pretty much anything and everything.

I like them so much I partner with them to provide backup solutions for my clients.

As far as support goes I never had an issue. They have been great to work with from the sales and support side. One of my best partners.

8 Spice ups
4

If you are all VM then you could do either Unitrends or Veeam (no appliance from Veeam). If you are physical or a mix then I would only recommend Unitrends. Any issue I have had has been resolved right away by their awesome support and as long as your appliance is sized right you shouldn’t have any issues.

4 Spice ups
5

I’ve been very happy with our Unitrends appliance. Support is very helpful. Did you have any specific questions?

One thing I suggest, no matter who you end up getting quotes from - talk to support, not just sales, when finding the correct solution for your needs. Sales people tend to go after the sale and sometimes don’t get all the details needed to make sure the appliance they are trying to sell you fits all of your needs.

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6

Joseph - thanks for taking a look at Unitrends! Have you looked at our reviews here on Spiceworks? There are quite a number of reviews posted by other IT pros, and these can be found here If you have any product specific questions, please let me know.

3 Spice ups
7

We moved from Symantec to Unitrends and don’t regret it at all. We have a mixture of physical and VM, and Unitrends handles both easily. We have two appliances with one replicating to the 2nd for an off-site backup. Our only issue (and not Unitrends problem) is that the pipe between the 2 sites wasn’t big enough (working on upgrading) to handle the amount of data. The incremental back ups worked fine, but when a synthetic backup hit, then it was too much data to pass through the VPN in a timely manner, and the other backups would start stacking up until we ran out of space.

3 Spice ups
8

I have a Unitrends device, and it is a somewhat love/Hate relationship at this time. I have 10 SQL servers I need to back up, with multiple databases on each.
The main issue I see is that the backups for SQL cannot be configured as I want them. I like to run Diffs every 4 hours, and full backups daily. This is not a problem for the device at all, runs perfectly, 99.99 percent of the time. Where I have a problem is when trying to remove old backups.
The GUI for removing old backups is somewhat klunky, and if I select the differential jobs to delete them, the full backups are also deleted. This is a huge problem that I have not been able to sort out.
At first I thought, okay, create 2 jobs, 1 for differentials, and 1 for Full, and set different retention times, well that will not work, a second job cannot be created, you get an error that the databases are already assigned to a schedule. I am finding this very frustrating, and can’t seem to come up with a solution. I have contacted support about this in the past, but, the issue has not been resolved.
I have been happy with the performance and most of the capabilities of the appliance, I only hope they can come up with some fixes for the above issues.

2 Spice ups
9

Two physical, everything else virtual. We’d gladly use a USB hard drive for those two if any solution didn’t support them. They are mostly static data anyway. We’d be backing up SQL 2000 (ERP, business critical, kind of a big deal) and SQL 2008R2. Everything else is files, sans Sharepoint 2007.

This refresh would be replacing DPM 2007. Our maximum RTO is 3 days from a total loss of ~5TB of data.

I looked over some of those before posting, I know Unitrends has a glowing reputation here on Spiceworks, which is a major reason we are considering you.

We’re wanting to get file level restores and the ability to spin up and restore a full VM (largest single VM is ~700GB). A recent loss/rebuild of a file server was what prompted our interest in a refresh.

Our DPM server is aging, and if we can consolidate and combine functionality, we would like to also move away from Symantec’s BackupExec for our tapes.

2 Spice ups
10

Katie, I’m trying to find out if we want/will need to replace our tape decks, do you have a list of known compatible tape decks?

11

We have been using Unitrends for about a year now. We have the Recovery 312 1 TB desktop unit. We have about half a dozen physical and virtual servers we keep backed up. The appliance is application aware, we have an exchange 2010 and SQL 2012 database it back ups. We typically run differentials about twice a day and masters on the weekends. As for SQL it logs get backed up every couple of hours.

I see you have a SQL 2000 server. A heads up we just migrated from SQL 2000 recently and you will have to talk to a Unitrends tech and have them get you a legacy SQL client to backup the SQL DB. They may have fixed this issue with a current version, but this is what we had to do. It works great with SQL 2012.

Before we had Unitrends we also used Symantec Backup Exec and it was a pain to manage. We don’t use tapes but use a NAS unit that Unitrends archives to. This NAS is off site so it is also our disaster recovery plan. All backups get archived twice a day. Only this is archiving to a NAS has an additional cost.

A new feature of 7.4 now included bare-metal recovery in a master backup. This helps cut down on unit space.

It has great reporting. You can set it up to send you an email if a backup fails or when an archive completes. As well as a lot of manual reports you can run.

3 Spice ups
12

Unfortunately, our ERP system is an older version and cannot use a SQL server newer than SQL 2000, and there is no plan to bring the ERP current. So supporting SQL 2000 is a must.

Thanks for the heads up.

13

Only complaint. And I mean ONLY complaint is that the installation engineer I worked with wasn’t as knowledgeable as I would have liked, and also couldn’t answer some of my questions (such as how to setup AD authentication, which still doesn’t seem to be working). I think my problems honestly were more at the level 2 support tech level anyway so I don’t fault him much. I also did the whole install/config myself before I even talked with the installation tech because I had to wait a week for my appointment with him and I needed good backups NOW. He just sort of double checked my work and answered questions I had come up with and showed me a few tips.

My dealings in support have been quick and helpful. I don’t like sales people and my installation tech kinda had the feel of a sales guy attitude. idk, Even though I still am within my 30-day window to re-open my installation case I have just moved on to dealing with support directly. In subsequent installations I have foregone the SureStart installation all together. I advise getting it at least once, or pulling in someone who has worked with Unitrends before but the value of the SureStart installation is limited once you are familiar and comfortable with how Unitrends works. I felt for the service was overpriced as it was basically a 15 minute double check of work I had already done. Skill level dependent I suppose. Watch the videos on the website and you know everything you need to know in my opinion.

When I talked to Sales last they told me I needed a Recovery 713 or better unit to make use of Tape as well, but I didn’t inquire much about which tape drives are supported.

14

I was using SQL server 2000 and it backed up ok. You just have to configure and manage the backup from the agent rather than the appliance. The SQL agent came with the normal agent install and it was a little confusing to set up so I had my installation tech show me how but they didn’t need to give me any legacy client.

My advice on this one is to remember you must manage everything about the SQL server 2000 backup through the client, and ALWAYS remove the backup schedule before you detach a database. Otherwise you can’t remove it, the appliance will constantly complain it can’t back it up anymore, and in my case I migrated the DB to an express version of 2012 and couldn’t move it back to my old server so I had to restore the DB from backup, reattach it, so I could remove the schedule, and finally remove the DB. It was a whole ordeal.

15

Oh, one last complaint, I have yet to get ANY windows client to work with Unitrends when you try and push out the agent. I have Windows Server 2003, 2003 R2, 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 servers I have tried it on, and no matter what I do, I can’t ever seem to get it to push the agents out. I only have 4 servers at each office I work for so it’s not a huge deal to manually install the agent on each machine. Your mileage may vary

16

What client version are you running? I had to install 6.4.1 to get it to work.

And yes you have to manage it from the client. Scheduling can be confusing, but once setup you can see the backup history results in the regular console.

As for the client push install I’ve had mixed results. I find it easier to manually install the client.

2 Spice ups
17

I installed 7.3 and noticed the SQL Agent came with it. I removed my SQL Server 2000 machine before 7.4 came out so idk if its the same but I imagine it is.
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The installation tech just used the MS SQL Agent that came with 7.3 and everything worked. Just checked in the Help>about of the SQL Server agent and it says 7.4 so that leads me to believe that 7.4 has it included as well.

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Barring all else, based on the listed capacity alone, we would probably want to be well above the 713, so that shouldn’t be a problem. DPM 2007 (no fancy dedupe in place) is over 5 gigs as it sits now.

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I have done several file level restores without issue (some tests, some real ones) and have tested the Windows Instant function by spinning up one of our servers for testing. I didn’t go fully live with it, but other than turning on the network connection everything appeared to work perfectly.

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20

Looks like you’ve gotten some pretty great feed back here! Might I also suggest taking a look at Quorum’s DR solutions? We can back up physical and virtual servers, and from what I’ve read we might be a good fit for your environment. Have you seen what other have said about us in our reviews here on Spiceworks? Let me know if you’d like any additional information!

2 Spice ups