Likelihood to Recommend Sungard seems to be well-suited for those companies still doing traditional disaster recovery - replicating data (or shipping tapes), building out the servers/mainframe/AS400, restoring data/databases, then loading the applications and testing. We have limited exposure to their cloud offerings. For the most part, they can also take on or assist in the initial builds of client environments - we used them for building the OS only.
Read full review The Infrascale Platform solution we have in place is certainly not cheap - I believe we are paying about $2800/month for it, though it is quite robust. We have 18TB of on-site storage available, with the same available in a secondary - remote - device for replication. They do have a wide range of products available to any size business though, so I'm sure they have cheaper offerings as well. The on-site appliance is fantastic - in that in houses your backups, but can also be utilized as an emergency piece of hardware to spin up a backup and run it in the event of your primary hardware failing. You can also traverse full backups to grab single, contained, files if you so choose. We love that feature as we must perform file recovery monthly for audit purposes.
Read full review Pros Sungard does a good job dispersing risk. Even though the equipment we subscribe to is also subscribed by many other companies, they do a good job spreading those subscriptions across multiple industries and geographies, so that it is highly likely they'd have the equipment you'd need in the event of declaring a disaster Sungard has also done a good job working with us to break out costs, so that we are able to allocate our invoices amongst multiple products and clients. Sungard does a good job with security - physical security in the facilities, ensuring our interactions with them through their help desk or portal are secure, maintaining good access control, and providing us with options for ensuring our data is encrypted during testing activities Read full review Makes consistent, verifiable onsite backups of our corporate data. Makes consistent, verifiable offsite backups of our corporate data Plays very nice with VMware, the infrastructure we currently use Read full review Cons Some facilities are located in inner-cities - while easily accessible by everyone, sometimes environment leaves something to be desired. Limited expertise in Solaris (Sun) regarding their managed services offerings. Often times a laborious process to engage someone to do hands/feet work. Read full review More expensive than Backblaze Read full review Usability It is one of the best cloud back up data protection software and software platforms on the entire market for MSPs. There are not many other solutions that offer this level of customization and execution in the data protection and disaster recovery arena better than Infrascale. I highly recommend it for any MSP.
Read full review Support Rating It is the cheapest way to truly protect data and has an amazing support team behind the product. You get what you pay for.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I had used
IBM Disaster Recovery Services in a previous job. While I found IBM much quicker to work with in terms of updating our equipment reservations, I've found Sungard much easier to conduct testing with. Specifically, they are much more adaptable and client-focused.
Read full review Infrascale Platform is the most modern backup service/device we've utilized. EaseUs and Ghost were just software that would run within a Windows environment (at the time) and backup to a device that we kept on-site. EaseUs would fail quite often with Incremental backups - so I would spend a lot of time re-running full backups to ensure we didn't experience data loss in the event of a crash. Ghost was used when I was first hired at this district - so I didn't have much hands-on experience with it. But I know it was a bundled offering with Anti-Virus back when we utilized it ('07-'09ish).
Read full review Return on Investment ROI is a difficult concept regarding BCP or DR, since most dollars spent towards this are simply regarded as 'insurance' rather than an investment. Our ability to test and share those results with many of our clients is probably the biggest non-monetary return on investment we get. Read full review Peace of mind: our entire virtual environment is backed up both onsite and offsite As stated, it is pricey. Since we haven't needed to do anything more than basic file restores, ROI is hard to measure. A full restore of a virtual server immediately would be priceless. So, on that note, ROI is good. Read full review ScreenShots