Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Sometime due to slow drives there are operation failure noticed by us in testing Cost of restoring data is high and if you have regular restoring them it is not good option and slow as well. While we were setting up the system we took some support from AWS and in many cases their answers were not up to the mark. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.
Read full review 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?
Read full review Reliability and Availability The appliances have been there when we need them and have rarely if ever gone down. Hardware issues have been resolved quickly.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Performance The hardware is adequate and speedy. The user interface responds quickly. Backups complete quickly.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Online Training It was sufficient to get started. It was not super deep. We called support often to get going.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review 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
Read full review Scalability Once you exceed the capacity of the appliances, you have to forklift a new appliance. This is very expensive.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Return on Investment We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class. Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines. Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots