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I know Unitrends comes highly recommended on here, so i’m hoping some users can answer my questions, maybe even a rep can chime in?

-Is there a difference between using the appliance vs the software + a NAS?

-Does the “cloud” storage feature allow you to backup to anywhere, ex a NAS located at a separate data center, or are we locked into the unitrends cloud?

-How effective do you find the data deduplication, Ive had varied success with it?

-We currently do full backups to disk, then to tape, and have a cloud device too (barracuda), how painless is it to run this sort of backup, right now we have to manage different systems (backupexec, etc) so management takes longer, so do restores

-Anyone use both barracuda and unitrends, how do they compare?

-Will unitrends support a used off-lease appliance? Barracuda only supports new hardware if you resell the hardware they wont transfer the registration so they are basically useless (makes resell value worthless)

-Any other feedback / comments? All in all i only have physical servers to backup, and i have a total of about 700GB that needs backing up, so I am not sure what size appliance i should use. We currently have a 5TB NAS that we do BE2D with.

As an aside I’m in no way bashing Barracuda backup. I like their interface, the ease of setup, and their tech support (especially the free install-setup training). The issue is the unit we have we are outgrowing, so I either need to switch to a larger Barracuda, or evaluate other options. If I stayed with Barracuda I would still need BE or similar to handle the tape backups. Their cloud pricing is also a bit more then we would like to spend ($50\month\200GB blocks), considering we have a NAS in a separate DC that i wish we could backup to.

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Hi Dan

I guess I fit all the requirements, user, reseller, technician & group admin, so hopefully I can help!!

Before I get into it, Unitrends is doing a Webex with Spiceworks at 1PM Central today, going through how & why Spiceworks uses Unitrends for their Backup, Disaster Recovery & Archiving needs. You may find that interesting, definately worth signing up for:

http://www.unitrends.com/webinars/462-spiceworks-uses-unitrends-backup-disaster-recovery-and-archiving.html

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Yes, primarily the licensing model used for each. The physical appliances all work on the ’ No Limits Licensing ’ model where basically if you can fit it on the appliance you can back it up. Both can protect 100+ Versions of Operating Systems and Applications. The UEB VM is not software as such , it is a pre set up VM that can run on HyperV and VMware hypervisors. It can be licensed either by capacity [i.e. 2TB] or by resource. Depending on your setup & what you are trying to achieve will dictate the best setup for you.

As for using a NAS as the storage for your VM, that again depends on what you are trying to do. As a general rule I would recommend local storage on a RAID10 array. Ultimately it is down to the Hypervisor to pass the storage through to the VM, so if your host server can manage it, the UEB should be able to use it. It just see’s it as a local disk. There are some caveats to that, how the storage is added & managed & such, but I would not recommend going down that route if you don’t have to.

If you are wanting to use the NAS for storage so that you can use the same host server to run your backup VM as you are for the production servers you are protecting I would recommend against it. It is best practice [and common sense] to have the backup on physically separate equipment.

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There are three parts to this. For using NAS as the backup target for your UEB see above.

With their Disk to Disk to X [D2D2x] technology you can archive [long term retention] to Cloud, Disk, Tape, NAS & SAN. With this you can have the backup appliance at one location & a NAS at another [private cloud]. You can run the backups as normal then archive to the NAS for off site DR.

You can also use the Unitrends public cloud or your own unit at a different location [private cloud] to replicate to. This is much more than just archiving an old backup, this is automated replication to another unit, with the ability to recover from it if your primary unit goes down / is lost etc. in a disaster.

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Dan - thank you for considering Unitrends! I’ve answered your questions below, and asked a few questions to make sure I’m answering your questions correctly:

-Is there a difference between using the appliance vs the software + a NAS? - Are you asking about the software or something else?

-Does the “cloud” storage feature allow you to backup to anywhere, ex a NAS located at a separate data center, or are we locked into the unitrends cloud? - Yes, you can backup to your own private cloud, a public cloud, or the Unitrends cloud. The biggest bonus for the Unitrends cloud is that if you choose a physical appliance from us and the cloud, should you ever experience a full scale disaster, we will pre-populate a new appliance before we overnight it to you.

-How effective do you find the data deduplication, Ive had varied success with it? - Data deduplication ratios vary from environment to environment, and results are based upon the data that is being deduplicated. We’ve seen up to

-We currently do full backups to disk, then to tape, and have a cloud device too (barracuda), how painless is it to run this sort of backup, right now we have to manage different systems (backupexec, etc) so management takes longer, so do restores - This is the ideal implementation of Unitrends and can all be managed from a single interface.

-Anyone use both barracuda and unitrends, how do they compare? - here is a comparison between the two that you may want to take a look at.

-Will unitrends support a used off-lease appliance? Barracuda only supports new hardware if you resell the hardware they wont transfer the registration so they are basically useless (makes resell value worthless) - We will always support any Unitrends appliances, but there are caveats. As appliances age, their support costs increase. Also, if this hardware was from an older appliance family, then it may not be capable of doing tasks like deduplication, instant recovery, etc. Another thing to consider is the drive size - our current racked appliances can have 3TB drives in them compared to the 750gb drives that we used just 3 years ago. Can you forward over the model number that you’re considering so that we can let you know what the first year of support would cost vs a new appliance and new support?

-Any other feedback / comments? All in all i only have physical servers to backup, and i have a total of about 700GB that needs backing up, so I am not sure what size appliance i should use. We currently have a 5TB NAS that we do BE2D with. - There is a plugin that we created to help you with this. You can find it here .

Please let me know what other questions you may have.

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That depends primarily on your data. If you have 100 VM’s that are 95% identical then you will get amazing deduplication & compression ratios. If you have 10TB of unique data then there is not much to work with.

Have a look at this thread for some more info on this:
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/304327-how-is-the-dedupe-ratio-so-high

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We got an appliance a couple of months ago, so I’m still getting used to the thing. Support has been very good. We had a few issues with delivery and initial setup and they were all over it, making sure things got to where they were supposed to be. While it did push back my install by a few days it was nothing major and they handled it well. I’ve since had a few issues, some my fault, some not, and their support portal has gotten quick responses and everything had been straightened out very quickly.

We went with the recovery-813. We have ~1.5TB total storage across our servers. We wanted to assure next to no downtime on three of those so configured for 3 VMs. We’re running hourly backups on those 3 servers, daily on the rest. We archive to an eSATA drive attached to the appliance. So far everything seems to be going very well.

I’m attaching a picture of the dedupe report. To be honest, I’m not sure what all the lines on there mean, but it certainly seems to be doing something.

When you talk to a sales rep they will give you a form to fill out with info about your environment. They will suggest a device (assuming you go with an appliance of course) based on that information.

dedupe-rate.jpg
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This is pretty much the bread & butter of how Unitrends does things. For physical archive the recommendation is to go to disk instead of to tape, though tape is supported. They actually have a 4 bay archive unit that can take up to 4 hard drives, archive to them & stripe the data across all the disks. They also have a 1 disk unit for smaller / one off jobs allowing you to archive to a single disk at a time.

You can also archive or replicate off site, see above. It works perfectly fine to archive locally to removable media & replicate off site.

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See Katie’s link to compare the two units. When I first came across Unitrends I was looking for a solution for my company & looking hard at Barracuda. One of the biggest issues for us was that Barracuda did not support encryption on the device / cloud storage. The other big issue I had was that it had to be managed through a web console, but not direct to the unit, you had to go to their online website to manage it. If your internet connection is down that becomes a problem. In a disaster [think fire / flood / tornado, hurricane / earth quake etc.] there is a fair chance that your internet connection will be affected. When I came across Unitrends we loved it so much we ended up becoming a reseller [the first on Spiceworks], but I will always be an IT guy first & foremost.

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Katie pretty much covered this already. Unitrends will continue to support the unit even after the initial 1 or 3 year support contract is up. Lease or outright purchase has no bearing on support other than you have to have support for the life of the lease if leased through Unitrends. That said, as the unit gets older it is less capable [from a hardware / technology standpoint] when compared to the newer units. Unitrends has an amazing trade in / trade up scheme that allows for a significant discount on new hardware, so most people use that to get newer / better hardware.

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You can use the Unitrends plugin for Spiceworks that Katie mentions to get definitive storage numbers then plug it all in to the Appliance Navigator to see what would work best for you. When you discuss your setup with Unitrends / a reseller there is a Tech Audit that they will ask you to complete. That allows us to make sure we are getting the right setup for your environment.

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Both Barracuda & backup exec have their place, though BUE gets a pretty rough time here on Spiceworks. I have heard good & bad things about Barracuda’s tech support, it sounds like you have done OK with them. Customer service is one of Unitrends’ key selling points, they have a US-based support team and are very proud of their 99% customer satisfaction rate. For them it is not customer satisfaction, it is customer delight, anything else is not good enough.

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What will be the compression ratio for the Unitrends Appliance 943, Is there any possible to reduce the compression for a appliance?

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Sridihar - Compression ratio is based upon the user’s specific data, but we’ve seen close to 2:1 compression ratios in our labs. Please let me know what questions you may have about this.