Carbonite Server vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

More than enough for small companies with several on-prem servers. In 2021, it wouldn't be wise to pit all important data to a single backup service. Carbonite Server is solid, but it's not 100% reliable so I'd definitely recommend having multiple backup services either on the cloud in conjunction with other backup services so the user has multiple safety nets in case of disaster and failed granular restorations.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The end-user experience is as simple and robust as I have ever seen from a backup solution. The end-user dashboard, should you choose to allow them access, is intuitive and granular.
• eVault has the best bandwidth management I have experienced. The endpoint target is available for all operating systems and is intelligent and efficient using very low overhead. It includes data de-dupe and encryption while using very little system resources. Combine these features with bandwidth throttling and you can backup a large amount of data over any size wire.
• eVault's deployment options will fit any budget and size environment. You can deploy using your own hardware, even. They really focus on providing the right solution for each customer instead of making each customer fit into their pre-determined box.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The backup report really needs improvement. It is really pathetic, as it gives wrong information. It is not suitable for auditing.
• The Exchange DAG backup should support instead of configuring each exchange server.
• Cloud infrastructure supports a lot of AWS and Azure instances that are coming up.

Incentivized

• 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 packaged carbonite server with the end user product that they provide but we have had issues where the end user site has been down for days at time and backups for both server and user are backing up but we do not the get notification that it was completed for several days. There appears to be latency issues with the mail delivery for completed backups. Additionally, I have used other backup products and find the Carbonite website interface very clunkly and difficult to navigate.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Product needs a lot of improvements in some features like Cloud and Reporting.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Some of the requests we could not get resolved on time. They took a long time to provide the reason for the issue we had raised.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We had appliance and we just needed to setup the Director Console which was straight forward and easy.

Incentivized

Netbak is a great product but we also had a secondary issue of having to backup several PC's on site and at remote locations. Carbonite helped with both and gave us one central admin console to be able to check the progress of all our backups, where netbak would have required us to setup a tunnel or use the internet to move data back to our main office.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• While EVault can become expensive if you have a lot of data to store, but you have to keep in mind that it does not cost you anything more to restore your data in the event of an emergency. Some systems give you a great upfront cost, until you actually need to retrieve your data.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized