Designed to be simple to configure and manage, the scalable Barracuda Backup solution is offered via a capacity-based, all-inclusive subscription model allows you to pay for only what you need to protect today, avoiding large upfront hardware costs.
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Dell Avamar
Score 5.5 out of 10
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Dell Avamar is a hardware and software data backup and deduplication product. It provides protection and recovery through a complete software and hardware solution when paired with Dell Data Domain for virtual environments, remote offices, enterprise apps, NAS servers, and desktops/laptops.
Barracuda was a much more cost effective solution than the others we evaluated. Its interface was light years ahead of Avamar, and its cost was much lower than Unitrends. Avamar had it beat in backup time, and Unitrends was a more mature product. In the end, Barracuda won out …
If you are a small business with a few machines and your backups aren't of servers that are public facing. If you had to restore a server from backup, it would take a day at least. So, if the server being restored was public facing, that may impact customer relations.
This software is well suited for companies that want to be very in control of their backups but need a simple tool. It could be convenient for them to just buy their own node, locate it in a different location, and set up the jobs for their machines to backup to the cloud with the specific plugins. However, it would not be convenient for companies looking to have a tool that needs to be secure and compliant, and that need to have different other options for business continuity.
Set and Forget. I rarely have to touch the Backup Servers. Once you specify your criteria, you really don't need to change it unless you have a physical change.
Alerts. When there are issues such as files failing to backup or a directory no longer present, you get an email giving you all the information you need. In addition you will typically get contacted by support about it.
Recovery is very simple. The restore browser is very good and it's just easy to find and restore data when you need it.
Avamar performs data deduplication on the remote host. This greatly reduces the amount of traffic that each backup requires. This even applies to the virtual environment through change block tracking. Backup times are reduced from hours to minutes.
The management interface makes it easy to configure and maintain data retention periods. Many times certain data must be kept for an extended period of time. There is a specific menu for managing retention periods.
The system is able to recover itself from a hard failure with virtually no loss of backups. There is a checkpoint taken each day that provides a recovery point in the event of a catastrophic failure. Since this is a node based system, the loss of more than one node could require a recovery be performed.
While another grid must be purchased, the replication utility allows all backups to be replicated to another grid at a remote location. This ensures the resilience of the backups in the event there is the loss of the primary data center.
Also works on HCI devices performing image-level backups as in our primary data center environment
There is also now an All-in-One appliance for smaller locations
The pricing solution has gone from allowing on-premise ownership to forced cloud extortion. Basically, if you buy now you will be ok, but those of us who "owned" our solution previously are now forced to subscribe to the cloud model or be stuck with a brick.
The client interface has constant JAVA issues and can be slow and chunky. We have often had issues with current versions of JAVA breaking it so it will not even run.
The backup clients are split out for function. Although this makes them light, it also makes it cumbersome to upgrade clients. The naming scheme can also be confusing for the clients.
I have been using the product for over five years. This has performed so well that with the current system reaching its End-of-Life with EMC next year, I have proposed replacing it with the latest version of the product. Now that it integrates with Data Domain, the cost has been greatly reduced. Instead of the need to purchase many nodes, one Data Domain can replace them creating a significant cost savings.
Dashboards and interfaces within Barracuda Backup are very easy to navigate, with clear success/warnings shown. Setting up backup jobs is probably one of the most simplest tasks - compared to competitors we trialed. Trouble shooting backup issues is also simple due to clear errors (VSS errors shown in a understandable format for example)
The system overall is easy to monitor and see your backup/restore status. The user interface could use updating as it relies on Java and any updates to Java cause the interface to stop working need to be reinstalled
They are always quick to get you routed to a tech support person and always get follow up after contacting them. Last experience was amazing, she adjusted my boxes and they perform even better. I cannot say enough about the support. We had some trouble with one of the windows servers leaving the volume shadow copy out there and would fail. They worked with us to adjust and get working. After that it has been months since I have had to do anything with the server to keep the backups running.
Support is very convincing, always eager to solve issues from the root rather than workaround, don't hesitate to take webex, describe the issues to the core and recommend configuration to avoid further issues. We can ask few questions other than the main issue. They don't hesitate to answer.
Each backup solution has its pros and cons, and each customer has their needs, and budget constraints. Barracuda Backup has helped us dramatically in the area of being able to provide customers a cost-effective solution, that's easy to manage and is one of those things you're not having to check on daily, or switch out backup tapes, or hard drives.
Avamar has simplied the back up approach in their VE edition and is much easier to use than Data Protector. Backing up multiple VMs takes minutes instead of hours now. Creating policies, retentions, and schedules, is vastly improved and much easier.
Countless positive impacts from being able to restore lost or deleted files - or even restoring an entire server.
Being able to restore files for users and allowing them to recover lost work or preventing them from having to redo files at any level is priceless. You can't accurately measure lost time of employees having to recreate files. Especially things like 3D drawings and multi-sheet spreadsheet.
