Carbonite Availability vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

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.

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

• 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.

• Easy configuration and setup.
• Testing of a particular VM or datastore with several VMs is easy.
• Auto configuration of IPs makes the process even easier.

• More verbose error messages. So we can fix problems with more ease
• More bandwidth settings for throttling.
• Ability to restart services on servers from the double take console

• 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.

- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster

the product UI is user friendly and product is straightforward to use.

VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• It has allowed us through DR testing to meet contractual requirements of our major accounts..
• It gives us peace of mind that in the event of a major issue we can perform our daily business with a relative success rate.

• 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.