Axcient x360Recover (formerly BRC) can not only recover a single server or desktop, but can automate the recovery of an entire customer site through its Virtual Office and automated Runbook features. In a disaster event, authorized users can log into the web application or Remote Management Console and create a virtual private cloud called a Virtual Office. The Virtual Office ensures security, privacy and reliability for every organization needing to run one or more failover virtual machines in…
N/A
VMware SRM
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
VMware's Site Recovery Manager (VMware SRM) is a disaster recovery option, used to automate orchestration of failover and failback to minimize downtime and improve availability with VMware Site Recovery Manager.
I feel that Axcient x360Recover is well suited for any environment, both large and small. Weather you build your own device, BYOD or purchase one of theirs, it all works great. I even use it at home via the direct to cloud option. Well work the investment. I am unable to find a downside at this time.
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
The business continuity component for spinning up the desired recovery point as a virtual machine on the appliance in order to keep the business operational is rock solid.
Recovering the desired backup point back to the physical hardware or virtual environment and syncing the most recent changes to finalize the recovery is awesome.
The system documentation is concise and easy to use.
The only thing missing is the ability to cancel a backup as they appear to just continue to try to run even after rebooting the BDR and endpoint until a failure finally occurs.
The only other ask would be to expand support to Linux operating systems.
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.
We've been using Axcient over the years and have worked with their development team to suggest new features, something that you would not normally be able to do with other companies. They listen to what we have to say and understand that we are a business, just like them. It's great to know that someone will always be there for you when you need them.
Issues with failing backups drag out for months at a time. Axcient hardware replacements are quick to be suggested by support but as the issues are most often with the software architecture this almost never helps. Support often uses their access to the appliance as a back door into customer environments without our consent and despite our repeated complaints, accessing our customers servers and executing disruptive diagnostics like chkdsk in the middle of production hours for that customer environment. More recently they've been blaming their frequent off-site transfer failures on our customer's firewalls (of all makes and models) and insisting that the only possible resolution is to increase the TCP session timeout dangerously high (multiple hours), putting every client environment at substantial disk of even accidental Denial of Service attacks. Talking to any two support individuals, even when escalated all the way to their development team, often yields entirely different and contradictory answers regardless of the problem.
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.
I had the miss fortune to go back to this device. Alot has changed since the first time I had used it. Now instead a full deployable network appliance, you have to download a preconfigured virtual machine that will only run on an ESXi server. What about Hyper-V? I have many clients that are Hyper-V only. I setup a test lab to get this thing up and running and it has been a nightmare to say the least. Will be looking at other options.
Security and encryption of Axcient is a top priority . Axcient have all the tools to provide solutions to different kind of businesses Best part is it has an MSP friendly console to manage multiples devices and clients at the same Dashboard. Deployment process is very easy in Windows an VMWare Devices.
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.
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.
