Likelihood to Recommend Arcserve UDP is fully suited for small to large size environments that need complete data protection solutions with the ability to run the fastest backups, replications, instant VM and DR.
Read full review AppAssure works well for quick access to point in time backups of Windows machines without having to do a complete restore. The virtual standby function is useful as a disaster recovery or high availability solution. Recent upgrades to the product and rebranding to Rapid Recovery look promising. If your Linux machines are mission [critical] make sure your administrators test restores so they can perform them in a timely manner should the need arise.
Read full review Pros Arcserve Backup has many offerings to fit many business sizes and needs. It offers excellent features like dedupe, high availability, DR, and BMR. Arcserve Backup sales and technical support is good to work with. Very nice reseller program and benefits. Read full review Continuous backup with deduplication and compression The P to V function of the software is create. To be able to back up physical machines and create a hot spare on a virtual environment was a great selling point. Can back up physical and virtual (ESX or Hyper-V). Read full review Cons Has a steep learning curve to the product, if not experienced in backup solutions. Windows backup and restore functionality is excellent, however, we have found Linux somewhat lacking. Rob Bates Public & Private Cloud Senior Engineer
Read full review Support for newer operating systems (Windows, Linux, VMware) is slow to be added. Usually takes 3-6 months from the new version being released for it to be supported. There is no way to automate the testing of the virtual standby which a lot of comparable products are able to do. The software has a backup type called "base image" which is essentially taking a full backup after an unexpected shutdown of the server. If your servers crash and they are very large, this may impact your storage requirements significantly. They do now have synthetic full backups which alleviate this issue a bit but they are not perfect either. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Arcserve UDP provides our organization lots of benefits and it is much more than a simple backup and restore solution. We use it for cross platform DR, storage agnostic replications, DR solution instead of VMware SRM and more.
Read full review Support Rating Arcserve Backup support is usually very good. Their chat is usually able to fix most general issues, but will escalate more in depth issues to technical engineers that call you back. Their product knowledge is really good and usually resolve issues promptly.
Read full review In the very few instances we've needed support they have been quick, friendly, knowledgeable, and dedicated to servicing our needs. That has only improved since AppAssure was bought out by Quest.
Read full review Implementation Rating Our initial installation really was not optimum. With the help from Dell Profession Services we were able to get our implementation sized correctly and better understand how to get better deduplication results
Read full review Alternatives Considered We use
Veeam Backup and Replication at our larger sites where Vmware Virtualization is being used and is our product of choice in this venue. When it comes to our smaller sites, nothing is more affordable and reliable than Arcserve Backup.
Read full review I've been using Rapid Recovery for the last 6 years and before that we had used Backup Exec, but it was a different implementation as we were still running backups to LTO3 tapes using the full/incremental backup schemes. So Rapid Recovery (AppAssure at the time) was a big change for us, backing up to disk instead with base images and changes. I would assume Backup Exec can do this as well, but haven't used it since switching.
NovaBACKUP was a lower cost solution that seemed geared towards smaller and simpler configurations
Read full review Return on Investment Deploying Arcserve UDP with the "copy-to-tape" option allowed us to reuse well over 50 LTO5 tapes used by our previous backup solution. Further, we extended data retention on site (maintaining monthly backups on disk) as well as extending off site data retention on tape. Read full review AppAssure paid for itself in the first year of usage. A user deleted a major file in our SharePoint sub-site, we used the DocRetriever for SharePoint Console and were able to go back to a particular incremental date and retrieved that file. One of our file shares crashed and we were able to put the physical server on a virtual standby which saved us hours of imaging and restoring of data. This allowed employees to efficiently continue their daily work without much downtime. The offsite replication alone has put an ease on the company in case of any disaster. When Hurricane Sandy hit, we didn't have a solution in place which put us on pins and needles to say the least. But with AppAssure we will be able to have some comfort that all of our mission critical data is being offloaded onto our other sites. Read full review ScreenShots