Acronis Advanced Backup vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

The endpoint protection is fantastic. Being able to recover a single file on the fly has saved many customers hours of frustration. Long term recovery of O365 data has worked well. I bit more difficult but not Acronis Advanced Backup issue, it has been MS issues. Nothing beats on premise backup / recovery speed but, when it is not available, Acronis Advanced Backup gets the job done for bare metal recovery.

It's quite well suited for a medium to large size VMWare virtualization infrastructure where your production infrastructure can be failed over to a disaster recovery site. There are other cheaper options for a smaller budget business. Also, for a non mission critical virtual infrastructure, you can simply use VM backups such as Veeam backups for restoring failed VMs

Incentivized

• Quick Virtualization. Acronis can virtualize most systems and get you back up in 15-30 minutes.
• Encryption of Backups. You own the encryption key, and Acronis doesn't - so not even Acronis employees can get into your cloud data. Encryption meets all HIPAA requirements for data protection.
• Easy to resell. You can create accounts for individuals outside of the company to allow them access to their backup console. It's very easy to set up, and clients are happy with how easy it is to use.

Incentivized

• Easy configuration and setup.
• Testing of a particular VM or datastore with several VMs is easy.
• Auto configuration of IPs makes the process even easier.

Incentivized

• They do not sell their product directly, so a reseller is needed - or third party website to process payments for them in order to download the product suite.
• They have done away with stand-alone software purchases, and have moved to a yearly subscription-based model. It's affordable, but you never truly "own" the software now.

Incentivized

• It’s unfortunate, but more and more, the quality of VMware’s products and the technical support teams behind them has degraded significantly. We have opened several support requests within the last few months and ended up resolving a large majority ourselves due to the poor performance of their remote teams.
• VMware is suffering from the same illness that’s affecting multiple U.S. technology firms, in that their focus has shifted completely away from their customers and moved to pleasing investors. In doing so, clients suffer because they do not get properly tested products and the support teams behind them are very weak and overwhelmed.
• We worked close to a month trying to get SRM V6.5 to work. We have worked with many previous versions of SRM in the past while using HP EVAs, NetApps and Hitachi arrays, and we can honestly say that we are greatly disappointed with this release and the company.
• We escalated right up to engineering, but their response times were brutally slow; the technicians were juniors at best.
• As a technology leader, the last thing you want during a DR is to be dealing with a company that just can't deliver. SRM is not cheap, and you would expect much better products and support from VMware.
• If you are comparing products, try other companies like Veeam... We ended up using them instead, the setup and execution was easy and seamless, and they answered all our questions quickly and efficiently. They actually do care about their clients.

The cost savings we realized from moving to this software has us hooked - it does everything we need it to do on a very high level (virtualization, for example) and is very low cost for us.

Incentivized

- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster

Incentivized

the interface is clean and easy to understand, things arent stacked 4-5 menus deep. logs and straight forward and easy to understand the problem

VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.

Incentivized

We seldom make use of Acronis support, but when we have they have been brilliant. All our engineers are Acronis certified, if they not able to resolve an issue, we touch base with our local Acronis supplier, Synapsys, who resolve issues 90% of the time.

Incentivized

Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.

Incentivized

We went with Acronis Backup Cloud because we're able to backup all platforms, not just PCs. And the price was good when it comes to all those options. It's a hard sell to clients, but when explained properly, the understand the cost of a good solution. It's like having good car insurance.

Incentivized

Entertained Veeam, however with SRM's tight integration and "brand" it was an easy decision. The cost for a 25 server license also weighed in the decision for using a VMware product. Plus I am a VMware fan and feel this option to go with SRM will transcend jobs.

Incentivized

• You have to watch for storage creep. The cost for storage can get away from you if you are not careful.
• We have 2 cloud servers that we moved off Acronis storage and onto our own cloud server. That has reduced our long term cost by 23%

• The biggest positive is that we have a data recovery solution that we can test and verify in a live condition. Prior to this we were only hoping we could recover from a disaster.
• We've been only running for 4 months and haven't had to use SRM.

Incentivized