Amazon S3 Glacier vs. Unitrends

If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.

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

• Cheap storage of backup data.
• Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack.

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

• Accessing data stored in Glacier is slow. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it is undesirable nonetheless.
• Retrieving a large amount of data can be expensive; Glacier's intended use is as an archive of rarely-accessed data.
• Some users regard Glacier with fear and uncertainty. Slow retrieval time and high retrieval cost are the greatest risks of using Glacier, and they are also the Glacier interaction that most users have the least experience with.

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

It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.

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

Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.

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

• Helped us meet compliance requirements while minimizing costs.
• Simple integration with almost no changes required to our existing S3 management policies.

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