1

We are currently evaluating a new backup/DR solution and want a one stop shop for backups and DR and our research has narrowed it down between the 2.

We like Quorum and Unitrends for the onsite appliance that if a physical server were to go down the appliance detects this and we can be up and running within minutes.

We have and are stuck with a very physical environment, need 7 years of retention for our critical data (500GB) and spin up of 6 servers/3TB of data in the cloud.

Any recommendations or horror stories of either please let me know.

6 Spice ups
2

I ran Unitrends for a while (my own server, not their physical appliance). Things were pretty good. It just seemed like a lot of usefully settings were missing from the documentation. The only way I found out was I would call their support about something and they would say “hey, it is better to have this option set this way”

Overall I would use them again.

2 Spice ups
3

Brian - Thanks for considering Unitrends! I know that you’re looking for feedback from your peers, but wanted to make sure that you knew that I am here to answer any Unitrends specific questions you may have. Please let me know if I can help you in any way.

4

I am currently considering unitrends myself so will be watching this thread with interest.

1 Spice up
5

We already use UniTrends and makes my life so easy with the replication

1 Spice up
6

I liked the Unitrends Appliances and the look of their overall system. When evaluating the VM version though it was a bit of a pain to work with. The downside of at least the Unitrends Appliances, is that you pay a lot for each level of storage. The benefit is that for their cloud storage you only pay for the initial backup size, and not the amount used for all archives and such, so that’s a bonus for you.

No experience with Quorum, sorry.

1 Spice up
7

No experience either with Quorum so can only talk about how much of a relief it was to replace our old system with a Unitrends appliance. Make sure to pick an appliance that is right-sized for you environment and pad a little for future proofing. I can attest to the great support that we’ve received from Unitrends, so if that’s something you value, it’s another plus for you!

1 Spice up
8

Unitrends is a very solid product. we went to that from using arcserve on multiple machines with individual tape units. well worth the money

1 Spice up
9

Can only talk about my experiences with Unitrends.

Defiantly make sure to talk to them to pick the right appliance (ask them about their instant recovery function)

As for horror stories? None - They have always been on the ball and saved me from a few scrapes.

1 Spice up
10

I came to Unitrends from Symantec’s Backup Exec. During the eval process, our primary concern was also achieving our retention goals (7 years). 3 years later, I still haven’t run out of space. The recovery appliance deduplicates data extremely efficiently.

For example, after 3 years running, as of today, 9/12, my 10 TB appliance is 50.8% full. However, due to my deduplication ratio of 22.58:1, I have 118 TB worth of data backed up.

If you have a large amount of historical data that doesn’t change, and you only incrementally add new stuff to your backup set, similar deduplication ratios should be achievable.

1 Spice up
11

I didn’t hear about Quorom before, but unitrends has saved us a lot and the support is also great.

1 Spice up
12

Ive not used Quorom before so cannot speak on that side of the fence.

We have been using Unitrends for nearly a year now (moved over from Symantec). Initially there where a few bumps in the road due to documentation being lackluster at times. So before embarking on this journey i would deffo give someone a call and go over exactly what you are looking for to ensure you have the right setup and settings from the get go.

But now i have all things tweaked to how i want i can say it pretty much just ticks along on a daily basis with little input from me.

1 Spice up
13

So, what’s the difference, in terms of licencing by TB or by socket? Where’s the crossover point where one becomes more cost effective?

14

We replaced our Netbackup solution with Unitrends and couldn’t be happier. Early on we went with two smaller physical appliances and quickly realized we didn’t size them correctly and found we were running out of space very quickly. A couple years in and we found ourselves upgrading to larger units. So my first recommendation is to make sure you size them correctly right off the bat. Now with our larger units we are taking advantage of the new SLA Policy feature which is keeping backup scheduling a whole lot easier to manage, as well as utilizing and incremental forever strategy that helps keep our backup sizes to a minimum.

1 Spice up
15

We have been using Unitrends for for almost 3 years. Replication and Backup schedules are easy to setup and you have the ability to setup Instant Recovery to deal with any server loss. Plus with dissimilar restores it doesn’t matter what equipment you replace your failed servers with.

1 Spice up
16

Full disclosure, I am an unabashed Quorum fanboy, so my apologies to the Unitrends folks :wink:

The short short version of this post: Go look at each of the respective appliances at the price point you’re looking at and look at their raw hardware specs (CPU, RAM, Disk and Disk Types (SSD vs HDD ratio)). Ask yourself which one would make a better, more capable host to my virtual machines. That will also tell you where each company has put their focus in regards to backup and DR.

I’ve been a Quorum customer for almost 4 years and it has been an awesome experience with absolutely no regrets. We hadn’t even heard about Quorum until we saw a demo at a seminar about a week before we signed with Unitrends (which we had thoroughly evaluated up until that point).

Like the OP, our key requirement for a DR appliance was to get back up and running quickly, and we thought (up until we saw Quorum) that Unitrends was the only appliance based solution that could fit the bill. After seeing the demo, however we knew that Quorum was far more closely aligned with what we were looking for.

In a (much) earlier post I detailed the key differences between the two systems: Click Here

Here’s the TL:DR version comparing the two systems

  • The core focus of the Quorum box is to build a standby clone of your server (physical and virtual alike) that is kept up to date and automatically replicated offsite. It can also do the usual recovery tasks of File/Folder/BMR restores

  • Unitrends was great at ingesting backup data, but for a full site recovery it required a lot of extra spare hardware to recover back to

  • When you protect a server with Quorum it automatically does everything necessary to build the VM. It builds the VM and replicates it offsite by default. You can change this setting for less critical servers, and build the VM at a later date if you need it.

  • When we last looked at Unitrends, you had to designate the servers to be “Instantly Recoverable” ahead of time. and it was not done by default. If you didn’t do it prior to a disaster/sever failure you couldn’t do it later. Furthermore you had to allocate additional space on the Unitrends box for the VM to reside. If this has changed in later versions then I stand corrected.

  • The whole Quorum box is essentially a “Hyperconverged” backup appliance. It runs Citrix XenServer as its hypervisor

  • I don’t know what Unitrends uses for it’s virtualization platform, but I’m pretty confident its not running a full hypervisor

The tipping point for us was when we asked both our Unitrends rep and our Quorum Rep the exact same question: “How many virtual machines can I run on this appliance?”

Our quorum rep gave us a straightforward answer, the OnQ 288 (the appliance we were looking at), will support about 40 VMs

Our Unitrends rep, and SE couldn’t answer the question directly. The gave so many caveats and qualifiers the best we got out of them was “maybe 5 or 6”

We have done 4 full scale DR tests with our Quorm boxes (we set a goal of a 2 hour RTO and we’ve beat it every time), it stepped in and ran my email server for 45 days when the old server died. I have seen the tech perform admirably in the world and I have complete confidence in it’s ability to perform.

1 Spice up
17

Patrick - It’s great to see you on Spiceworks again (it’s been awhile since we’ve both been in the same thread on here). Since the post you referred to above is over 3 years old, a lot of development has happened at Unitrends. For instance, instant recovery was only available on our physical appliances back then, but is available on all Unitrends deployments today. This means that you can provide the hardware, if you’d like vs buying a physical appliance. We’ve also expanded our cloud services to include Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) so that you don’t have to rely on or invest further in your local environment for disaster recovery resources (which is something that I believe the OP is interested in). The 2017 DCIG Integrated Backup Appliance Backup Guide covers the differences between the Quorum, Unitrends, and other backup appliances thoroughly, and the 2017 Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance Buyers’ Guide evaluates backup appliances that are integrated with at least one cloud based storage provider. Both are a great 3rd party evaluation for anyone considering these kinds of solutions.

2 Spice ups
18

Hi Katie, good to hear from you as well!

I know that things in IT never stay still for long so it’s good to hear about those additions to Unitrends product line.

1 Spice up
19

disclaimer: MSP who uses Dattos.

A Datto would be perfect for you. Consider it like a unitrends, but the ZFS + shadowprotect is more powerfull. When considering offering unitrends a few years ago, they didn’t stack up to datto with pricing and features. I’m not saying unitrends is a bad product at all, we’ve used the free for some platform backup that the datto didn’t support at the time. Here are some reasons we went datto:

  • Everything is included with the monthly fee. 24/7/365 real support with no extra fees for after hours/holidays/weekends, hardware and software support and warranty. Device burns up in a fire? new one preloaded and on the way. Need to spin up in the cloud or just want to to test? no extra cost. Having an issue that happens to be vmware related vs datto related? No charge to get to the bottom of it. Cloud storage included, cloud support included, cloud resources when running included.

  • NO extra modules or plugins needed for exchange, sharepoint, sql, etc. Kroll licenses included for granular recovery if you want to use it (i prefer to spin up the vm and restore whatever i need using native tools but hey it’s there.)

  • Appliance was more affordable up front

  • Interface and reporting is 100% better and cleaner

  • Different subscriptions let you have unlimited retention. That’s right: unlimited amount of agents, unlimited amount of data, unlimited amount of retention points.

  • I don’t know if it’s still the case, but on unitrends, if you wanted to spin up or restore a 1tb server backup, you needed 1tb of FREE space on the device. That’s not the case on the datto ZFS; have a 2tb device with 500gb free and need to spinup or mount a checkpoint that’s 1tb? no problem, no extra space needed and up instantly.

The downsides to datto are:

  • No way to replicate anywhere but them to save money on cloud storage. It’s an end to end solution, you’re using them and only them to off-site to. The Cadillac of backups and you can’t drop options to get into it cheaper. It’s all or nothing (besides maybe going the cheaper alto line.)

  • They support a lot of linux verisons but some older one’s not so much. no support for weird stuff like I series.

  • Can only go through a reseller, they are channel only (well, bad for you, great for me.) You can use this to put MSPs against each other for pricing i guess.

    PM me for more info, i love going on about them.

1 Spice up
20

Katie,

Let me start with saying that you are one of the most helpful, kind, and straightforward greenies on here. The opposite of most tech vendors, and a standard that others should follow in sales and product guidance. Unitrends really is a great product and even though it isn’t our mainstay, I have to say it’s a rock. However, this line:

" Both are a great 3rd party evaluation for anyone considering these kinds of solutions."

is frustrating to read time after time referring to the DCIG guides. New edition of both guides out and not a peep about Datto offerings in there? I don’t feel those guides are independent/3rd party at all, they’re basically unitrends marketing material. Datto is the probably the most direct competitor in the hybrid appliance space with a pretty apples to apples service/product to yours. Excluding them from the the study makes it seem like you don’t want anyone to see an honest comparison, that unitrends has something to fear by putting them in.

@katie

2 Spice ups