Arcserve Backup vs. NetApp ONTAP Data Management Software vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

Arcserve
Backup has had a positive impact on ROI, as a reseller we are able to
build in a healthy profit margin by reselling the product and services.
Some
of our company managed services are based upon clients running Arcserve
Backup.
Data
recovery and system recovery times have reduced over product upgrades and
enhancements, causing much less downtime

Incentivized

NetApp ONTAP Data Management is a must platform to most businesses around the globe since the tool generates various capabilities for the user to easily and very securely manage all the project data through the cloud services using the platform capabilities. The data analytics are generated in real-time and easy visualization of different data which the tool helps the user import across other platforms.

Incentivized

For remote locations, where communications are limited and cloud services are difficult to obtain, on-premises servers are the only solution. Hardware solutions require spares in storage for redundancy and are more expensive than software solutions. If communications and cloud computing are highly available, then solutions such as StarWnd Virtual SAN would not be needed.

• Cost - A very affordable solution.
• Support and Sales - Arcserve has been top notch to us with the sales process and support.
• Replication - One of the core reasons we selected the product. We find the replication side of the software fantastic.
• Backup - An excellent backup product that provides just great functionality and restore-ability at a granular level.

Incentivized

• Offsite replication is seamless.
• Snapshots are easy to implement.
• System Manager is easy to learn and manage the entire system.
• System Manager is feature rich.

Incentivized

• the StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to use Starwind Management Console to confirm health of the sync
• The High Available nature of the deployment means we can fail over VMs without end users noticing any downtime
• Their support is proactive alerting when firmware updates are needed (including iDRAC firmware) or when there are any warnings in the event logs, and schedule a time to remediate the issue with you.

Incentivized

• Support line just send a link so I have to research by my own.
• Requires you to buy a license for every agent add on.
• VMWare compatibility.

Incentivized

• Not necessarily a dislike of OnCommand per se but I do dislike that you have to still use different flavors of this tool to get a holistic view of every aspect of your NetApp - System Manager, Performance Manager, Unified Manager etc
• The initial process to connect to a filer probably could do with a little more friendly documentation as the format for filer name (or IP) and whether and SNMP string is required etc is not clear.
• The ability for more complete search capability within the logs (so therefore not having to extract them to work with them) would be an advantage for the timely resolution of faults.

Incentivized

• Integration with Other Platforms: Some users have reported difficulty in integrating StarWind Virtual SAN with other platforms, such as cloud environments or other storage arrays, making it less flexible for some use cases.
• Lack of Advanced Features: Some users have reported that StarWind Virtual SAN lacks some advanced features, such as the ability to perform in-depth storage analysis and reporting, or the ability to manage storage tiering and data migration.
• User-Friendliness: While StarWind Virtual SAN features a user-friendly interface, some users have reported that certain features are still hard to use, especially for those without a background in storage technology.

Incentivized

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.

This review is my baseline experience with StarWind Virtual SAN, should something significantly change in my experience over a longer period, then I will update this review but since the feature-set of StarWind Virtual SAN has been researched to meet our on-premise needs (and StarWind fulfills them), it should be relatively steady.

Incentivized

It basically covers all our required scenarios, including VMs, partitions, files or any other objects through NAS, SAN or DAS connections. It's easy to set up and utilize the features and functions. There are a few times that we needed to switch over for the RHA replications and UDP backups. For the RHN replication, there was a roughly 10 minutes downtime during the switchover. For the UDP, it works pretty well.

Incentivized

Functionality is very impressive, practical, and useful. GUI could use several improvements.

Incentivized

Starwind is generally very easy to use once you understand the concept. The only negative I can think of is that the Windows iSCSI implementation can be tricky to configure, Starwind doesn't handle this for you, and leaves the admin to configure it all manually. It would be nice if this were part of the setup process rather than an additional set of steps.

Incentivized

The solution has been tested under constant usage for 5 years now and there (knock on wood) has yet be an outage. There were instances if human error during the operation and the StarWind reliably intervened, either through a synchronization or reporting of a degredation of interfaces, e.g. the heartbeat interface.

Incentivized

The software delivered exceptional performance until now with very fast write and speed rates, around 900MB/s through a 10GBit connection on a virtualized fileserver. It meets our demands without any problems whatsoever and we are a very media heavy environment with TBs of raw data.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Support is great. Our account managers and system engineers regularly contact us and check in on us. Provide free training on various topics. Our team is readily available to answer any questions. Support tickets are generated automatically if anything goes wrong such as a disk going bad and a new one is sent out immediately. Very happy with support.

Incentivized

Their support team is dedicated to providing top-notch customer service and is always available to help with any questions or issues that may arise. Their expertise and responsiveness have proven invaluable in ensuring the smooth operation of our virtualized environment. With such excellent support, we feel confident in our ability to utilize this product to its fullest potential, and we highly recommend it to others.

Overall the setup was easy, we did require some help from the technical support team but other than that, we followed all of StarWinds prerequisites and everything else just fell nicely into place with hardly any downtime. The downtime was only due to moving VMs from our previous cluster over to the new StarWind storage cluster.

Incentivized

We also use Veeam replication and backups for VMWare level data redundancy. It works so far as stable as Arcserve Backup. We use both in our systems as we deploy VMs since Veeam works closely with VCenter. But if we need to backup physical servers, and OS partition level backups, which can only be achieved by Arcserve Backup.

Incentivized

I have not been able to use similar platform though in service delivery and functionality capacity this is the most effective tool in our company. The entire organization data and workloads are always under secure environment when managed by this great platform. It has enabled us to meet our objectives and speed up operations across in all departments. Data in both cloud and on premise is automatically connected to provide multiple services and bring efficiency.

Incentivized

Compared with the cost and complexity of a dedicated SAN or Hyperconverged appliance, StarWinds VSAN is much less expensive. While there is a limit on the number of nodes a cluster can support, we are not close to reaching that threshold.

The software is very scalable storage wise. The storage is provisioned through config files, which are created either through PowerShell scripts or the Management Console on the paid version. After that the storage is provisioned through iSCSI. In our case, in case of expansion, we would have to run the PowerShell scripts and do another full synchronization to update any remaining backup nodes, but the procedure is clear and even easier via Management Console, just expand the RAID array, punch the new capacity into the console and start the synchronization!

Incentivized

• Arcserve Backup is relatively low cost in comparison to some other products. It is full-featured and continues to receive additional updates and added features. This makes it an ideal backup solution for smaller sites and the reliability to restore from backups is excellent.

Incentivized

• It has saved a lot of resources contributing to positive returns on investments
• Our data is always secure under this platform

Incentivized

• StarWind Virtual SAN has helped many organizations reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage. This has been achieved through cost savings in areas such as hardware, power, cooling, and maintenance
• Provides high-performance, low-latency storage that is optimized for virtualization, which can help improve the speed and responsiveness of applications
• Provides synchronous replication, automated failover, and real-time replication monitoring, which helps ensure that data is always available and accessible