Carbonite acquired Double-Take, a data replication and disaster recovery option, in early 2017. The technology now powers Carbonite Availability, the now Carbonite supported high availability and data replication product.
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Hornetsecurity VM Backup
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Hornetsecurity VM Backup (formerly Altaro) is a backup and replication solution for Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines. VM Backup can manage large infrastructures, with the revamped backup repository providing long-term storage and more efficient use of disk space.
I believe it would work well with continuous replication in a DR scenario with no time limits and having the ability to fail back is a bonus, but in a one off move the decision to restrict the time it can sync for has proven to be an issue for us.
Do you have VMWare? Yes I can back it up. Do you have Hyper-V? Yes I can back it up. That in itself should speak for itself. Altaro has really given a great deal into their software, not only making it easy to use, BUT also a really good and reliable product where you can support your workloads hassle-free, and super lightweight
A product is worthless in my opinion if you don't have a great support team to work with. I've had issues with replication jobs that were resolved quickly and easily by the support team.
DR - Doubletake is the only tool that I'm aware of that can handle DR replication of both physical and virtual environments. There sre others, but they use a snapshot technology, where doubletake has continuous replication of data.
Move - we have moved physical and virtual environments from around the world without ever having to leave the office. One of the companies we migrated started off with their equipment in Switzerland, and after the servers were in a fully protected state in the US, that failover to the new location took 45 min.
Fast and simple setup. I didn't need to read through ANY documentation to set up and have a backup running.
Easy and cost-effective licensing. I didn't need to count CPU's or VM's or other random facts to work out my licensing. Just how many hosts, and then one of 3 feature levels of which two have unlimited VM licensing. Hosts x Feature Set = Cost.
Easy Restores. Backing up is one thing, but restoring and having confidence in the restore is another. It just works, simple and effective.
Help is easy to find if you need it. From within the app, it gives you options of email, phone, and live chat, which is usually available even with odd time zones in play.
More cloud-based storage options. Currently, only Azure is supported, which is excellent, but it would be good to have AWS and Google storage options too.
It would be AWESOME if they could do a restore from Azure cloud direct to an Azure VM instance. Currently, you need to set up an Azure VM machine with nested Hyper-V, install Altaro on that, and then restore into a nested VM, this gets crazy expensive.
Better notification of errors, or more around having a threshold, so if it misses one backup of a constant backup that happens every 5 minutes but recovers at the 10 minutes back, it is ok. Just think it needs to identify significant or long-running issues better than the occasional little issues.
A lot of people in the technical industry deliver what I would call snack crackle pop topics, where the software gets over complicated, and they drown people in all the "fancy" features. Altaro, from my point of view" has designed the software to be super usable, easy to implement, as well as support. It is really one of the best designs
Once through to support it is very good and they have assisted us through a number of issues. I don't always think that they provide a solution, more a workaround, but in a move situation where each copy is moving once, that isn't an issue. I'd be more concerned if we were using it to manage a DR scenario.
One of the most important benefits of the Altaro HyperV backup solution is the support. From the free edition, you're able to chat with the support that can assist you in a remote session an find a quick solution that solves the issue. It is always available. The email support is also.
It is better for critical apps than Veeam due to the lower RPO. Veeam is favoured by some customers due to it's attractive price point. Zerto is a very strong product and is innovating continuously. I don't see so much of this from DoubleTake.
The only other competitor I am personally familiar with is Carbonite. I use that for file-level backups throughout my network and it works well but while it does offer backups for virtual machines, I have never found it to be a reliable option. Jobs failed for me regularly for no apparent reason. In the handful of times I have needed support, they were helpful and straight-forward.
Restoring our primary ERP VM has already saved many hours of rebuilding from data backups, so that in itself already gave us an excellent ROI for having Altaro running.
The quick and easy setup also makes sense for a fast ROI as we didn't need to spend much time or effort in its set up.
Lastly, any other restores we have done for retrieving files or testing backups were so simple and easy to do that the process didn't take long and saved us time and cost.
