11:11 Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) vs. Unitrends

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.

Incentivized

We have a traditional stack and pretty typical needs as a manufacturer. I have used and evaluated everything out there, but the Unitrends solution fits very well and was competitively priced. I would think if it fits us, it could fit anyone like us with a similar stack.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• It has fully automated and customizable dashboards that can run with less administrative attention.
• It should be able to run on virtual machines or be deployed as a virtual machine within MS Azure or AWS.
• It's AI-based ransomware detection helps to understand data characteristics and alerts for ransomware attacks.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Errors on backup jobs could be more clearly explained. As the administrator of the device for my company, I often don't know what caused an error, and can't tell from the error information what happened or caused the error.
• Updates of the devices should have an automatic option. It takes to much time to do an update to the devices if updates haven't been maintained.
• Shutdown and restarting the device should be available from the main UI screen to eliminate some time when doing updates or if you're doing some maintenance on the device.

Incentivized

We have grown very attached to the Unitrends appliances and their use for recovery and other file restoration needs as well as data archival, data replication to other appliance and data migration to other servers or long term storage requirements. The appliances work well and the support for them is very good as well.

Incentivized

I have never used such an easy product that is stable and scalable like Unitrends. I have been running backups for MANY years. On premise, tape, disk, cloud, you name it. Unitrends is very flexible, stable and has incredible reporting features. It's nice when management requests a report and it takes you 5 minutes to run it and dump it to PDF. How can you beat that?

Incentivized

The appliances have been there when we need them and have rarely if ever gone down. Hardware issues have been resolved quickly.

Incentivized

The hardware is adequate and speedy. The user interface responds quickly. Backups complete quickly.

Incentivized

They're incredible, attentive, thorough. They make sure my issue is resolved and follow up. I'm usually behind on giving them a reply or an update. They have always gone above and beyond for me, and I'll continue to do the same for them.

Incentivized

It was sufficient to get started. It was not super deep. We called support often to get going.

Incentivized

The Unitrends employees involved in the installation were very friendly and knowledgeable. A certain degree of hiccups can be expected during any installation but never shook my confidence because of the friendly and knowledgeable team that was assigned to my project.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Symantec Backup Exec was the primary tool used for backups for years. We also used Veeam for some Office 365/Exchange backups. Unitrends once configured and set up works very well against the competition. Backup Exec interface was more user friendly. The search tool for exploring backups was much better than Unitrends as well. Unitrends is much faster if you need to restore an entire VM or large file folders. Also once you have Unitrends all set up, it is very low maintenance, it just works. If something fails 9/10 it will correct itself on the next backup that is scheduled to run

Incentivized

Once you exceed the capacity of the appliances, you have to forklift a new appliance. This is very expensive.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It has saved some deleted file server data for our business department.
• We have lost some reports for the business department due to an overlooked setting that make the backup reports look great, but the server was not being backed up in reality.
• Less anxiety for the IT department, we have backup plan and that is worth a lot to us.

Incentivized