Likelihood to Recommend If you don't have to manage your client's email and their email archiver Acronis works very well. If you're looking for just a backup service for what's on a particular computer then Acronis is perfect. It is easy to use, so newcomers are not overwhelmed with features.It does not include as robust features as Barracuda and Cloudberry, but it does work well as just a backup.
Read full review 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
Read full review Pros Image based backups. After the initial backup, the backups happen quite quickly. This allows for multiple backups per day. We have different classes of data which requires different retention policies. Acronis makes that easy to manage. Restoration can be done directly to hardware or to a VM. This makes it easy to migrate a physical server to a VM. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons The web interface is slow and can kick you off from time to time I do find that the error messages are hard to decipher if/when a backup is unsuccessful. However, support is very good in helping out the solution The user interface is not intuitive enough to find failures in backups or track logs with alerts or errors Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have renewed our subscription over the course of a few years now. We used to use Backup Exec and it was tedious and difficult to obtain our backups when needed. Acronis just fits our environment style and the way we prefer to do business and use our third party software.
Read full review - easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster
Read full review Usability I give it a rating of 9 do to its ease of usability. It's ease of understanding how to setup - form - fit - and function. I have no sorrows when having to login to the console in order to setup a new backup schedule or retrieve and recover lost data.
Read full review VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.
Read full review Support Rating I only got one issue resolved for more than 20 cases open. The escalation is ineffective. Most of the time, I have the feeling that I know the solution better than the support technician. Overall, case management is time-consuming, as our resolution rate is really low
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating I don't have any real key 'insights' per say except that it wasn't difficult at all, and do not be afraid to dabble in its tools and settings. It is quite intuitive with built in common sense. I cannot say enough good things about our companies experience when using this backup software.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We've looked at SolarWinds, Veritas, etc. but none of them had the right combination of features, price and ease of use when compared against Acronis and its ease of implementation, setup and recovery options. We didn't like the wait time for recovery with some of the others and being able to quickly get a machine back entirely was important to us.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model I would love it if they offered better cloud space pricing or even "unlimited"
Read full review Scalability The ability to back up multiple servers from one source is a great tool to have for businesses that have equipment in different locations on the same network with a variety of software data to back up such as SQL, Exchange or a Files Server. You can decide to purchase individual server licenses as well if you would like to keep the process separate or have multiple sites where your data is housed.
Read full review Return on Investment Every times you restore a file, you see the value and the ROI of backup. Backup is a great protection against ransomware, you can always restore files that has been infected. When you want to go back in previous version of files, it can be life saver. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots