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We are working on getting info together to meet with the CEO about switching from our current Tape / Backup Exec backup solution to Unitrends and my boss was asking if I was able to find some Unitrends users current and past to speak with us or allow us to send them a brief email / survey about Unitrends so we have some real world advice / reviews available to show the CEO.

Is there anyone out there that would be willing to let me send you a couple question survey / email about your experience with Unitrends, good or bad. If you are willing please let me know and I will get the questions to you by Monday, we are meeting with the CEO on the 29th so it’s kind of short notice but it would be great if I could get a few people to answer some questions. We are looking at getting 2 824 appliances, with 2 RDXA archive drives and will be doing site to site replication with our office in Montreal.

Kaite @ Unitrends, if you could assist with this that would be great. I am working with Robert Singleton and Rob Walker at the Burlington office they said that it would be better to post something here and if no one responds then they would ask some of their customers if they would be willing to do this for us.

Thank you, it’s greatly appreciated

Ryan

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This might not help you much in your technical analysis, but we are a new Unitrends MSP and evaluated several different platforms and toolsets – all with various strengths and weaknesses. The tipping point for us was in the Technical Support experiences we had with the Unitrends team as we worked through different use case, pilots, education, and architecture initiatives.

They do support right…(FWIW)

Jeff

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See the thing is we have a database guy for an IT director so he is more into just getting peoples experience with the overall product and company rather than see demos or trust me after using the free trial and telling him that this is going to work for us and change our IT environment greatly. Going from 60+ hour backup jobs, rarely having a chance to get a restore job in when needed, if the restores even work, to basically guaranteeing that we will be able to restore files / VMs quickly and there will be a true disaster recovery plan instead of just the disaster we have right now.

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i was doing the consulting gig for a while and we were a BE shop, every week between our team we were always dealing with errors and failures left right and center with BE. When i moved off on from the consulting side of things to a single network which had nothing in place for backups… no idea wtf the previous IT staff members were doing but it was horrible (story for another time)

I found Unitrends and got an eval unit, fired it up and had backups done over night, next day started testing some simple restores and things were very slick and easy. Very different then what i had previously experienced in the BE world.

Since we first moved over to Unitrends i have now a UEB VM install, 1 713 and 1 813 appliance. I have offsite replication doing to our own cloud and i now rarely have to deal with any failed backups and worrying about those. The restores are very quick and simple to take care of. also the instant recovery for vm’s if there happens to be a failure as well, vm’s may not have the horse power as they did on the main servers, but they’ll get the job done if required.

obviously you can tell i’m a happy unitrends user, as JPropps said, their tech support is awesome to deal with and the appliances call home if a drive starts failing, they take care of backups from so i don’t have to. I can spend my time focusing on other items that are required.

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I would be more than happy to answare few questions for you . We have a 712 with replication off site to a UEB.

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Ryan - Thanks for considering Unitrends! Have you taken a look at our reviews page ? It’s full of non-biased reviews, both positive & negative, about Unitrends. How many current Unitrends users are you looking to speak with? Also, I’ve contacted Robert & Rob about this already this morning. They should have been able to provide you with these details without coming to the community, so our apologies that this wasn’t handled for you already.

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UEB user here with over 3.2 TB protected…Clients and Servers…Have had to do Several restores from file level as well as whole VM…Love the product…converted from AppAssure during the Dell takeover nightmare! Happy to be a reference for you and Unitrends!

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I can answer some email questions for you. We’ve got a single 813 that we archive to an eSATA drive though so I couldn’t talk about some of what you are doing. I’ve dealt with support numerous times though so could certainly answer some questions about that.

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Hey Ryan,

I’ll be glad to let you know my experiences so far. Been using BE for several years (now on version 2012) for everything (exchange, sql, etc.) Installed the Unitrends 833 device around the first of the year, now have Unitrends performing most of the backups, with BE still handling a couple of the servers. Day to day backups and restores have been successful and easy.

You mentioned archive drives on the Unitrends device, that is the only area I have had some heartburn with. So far from my experience and subsequent conversations with Unitrends tech support, there is a limited time window for you to effectively perform the archive process. My last attempt to archive was dismal, and the master I was attempting to archive was 2 weeks old.

If you need more information, shoot me your email and I’ll provide more detail. overall I like the product much better than our previous BE solution, with a caveat for the archive limitations.

Ronnie

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Ronnie - Thanks for using Unitrends. I’m sorry to hear that you’re having issues with your archiving. Do you mind forwarding me your asset tag or case number so that I can look into your cases, and see if there’s any escalation that can be done?

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Unitrends is great as long as you fully understand it’s strengths and weaknesses and are willing to deal with both. I have a Recovery 713 appliance, and archive to tape once a week. I came from Backup Exec 2012 as well.

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I’ve been running a Recovery 711 appliance and archiving to an eSata hard drive since 2010. I’ve had 2 experiences with the unit and both times the Unitrends support tech called me to say that there was an issue. One was a hard drive that was starting to go bad and the other was a software issue if I remember right. The unit was still functioning correctly, but Unitrends’ monitoring system detected the issues before they impacted my backups. 2 thumbs up for their support. I’d be glad to answer any questions or fill out a survey.

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You guys are the best. I will get some questions together then if you don’t mind I will DM them to each of you. Yet another reason I love Spiceworks. I should have them to you no later than Monday and then I would just need them back by the 27th it will only be a few short questions, I’m not looking for essays here, I also want to hear the good and the bad.

Katie thanks for your help, it’s really not a big deal to me, I pretty much suggested it that I would post something on here to get some feedback, I don’t need you guys bothering your customers for us. I did take a look at the reviews page on Spiceworks and I am going to use some of those, but we also wanted kind of a customized survey type of review as well.

Thank you all again for offering to help out, I will be sending the survey / questions out soon.

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I know a little bit about Unitrends. I could certainly help you out if you still need another pepper level.

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Don’t know if you fellow Unitrends users have seen this, but have you checked out what is coming in 7.4?

http://blog.unitrends.com/

This is the reason I went with Unitrends and dumped Backup Exec. Quarterly updates that continue to increase the performance of the solution and offer support of the latest versions of all of the Operating Systems.

Can’t wait for this to go GA!

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Cliff - Thanks for pointing this out. We are in Beta right now, and are on time for our original target release date, so be on the lookout for some updates in the next few weeks.

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I am more excited for 7.5 when us Hyper V users will get the P2V and stand by machine lovin’ :slight_smile:

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We are excited about this update as well. You can achieve this today by treating your Hyper-V guests as physical machines to utilize the Windows Instant Recovery feature. Thanks to everyone who have given us feedback via the interface as to what features you’re looking for - we do our best to listen to these requests and prioritize our roadmap accordingly. If you don’t know how to do this, just go to About>Feedback in your Unitrends interface.

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Yeah, unfortunately us Hyper-V guys will be the red-headed step-children of the Virtualization world for the foreseeable future. =)

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So it’s not letting me attach a document to PMs, hopefully if I add it as an attachment here you guys will see it. If I could get this back by Wednesday or Thursday the absolute latest that would be great. If you don’t feel like answering some of the questions just skip them, just answer what you want to. I cannot thank you guys enough for helping me out with this. Please let me know if you need anything from me.

When you are done can you please email it to me, ryan.engstrom@globeunion.com

Thanks again, have a great weekend and Easter

Ryan

Unitrends_Survey.docx (13.7 KB)

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