Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review EMC VNX is suited for VMware environment as it integrates with vCenter. Integrates well with SolarWinds storage monitoring software. It is well suited for enterprise-level organizations with 100+ servers. It is not suited for small businesses as it requires specialized administrators and has relatively high license cost. It is not suited for businesses that host most of their servers on the cloud. Read full review Pros 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 Read full review VNX has had very solid uptime. Over the course of the last 5 years, we have had very little if any downtime. We have also used it for our home directories, and with the data dedupe on the file side it has saved us a lot of space. Adding additional drive space has also been really easy. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review It occupies a large floor space in the data center. Unisphere management interface uses Java, which is problematic to run. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Dell EMC Unity is the improved version of EMC VNX. It has all the features in VNX with better performance.NetApp all flash is faster and more expensive. It performs better with Citrix systems and VDI solutions. HP MSA storage system is less performant and less expensive. It works better for file and CCTV data storage. Read full review Return on Investment Absolute Zero ROI This appliance does not work in its current state and to update we need to wait 2-3 months Can't wait to get rid of it and replace it with something else. (not even sure if we will be able to get it running before that) [I think] this is one of the worst mistakes we made Read full review I think it has provided improved reliability and performance [compared to] our previous solutions. The lack of performance metrics has led us to need a 3rd party tool that integrates into our Vsphere environment to give us feed back on performance. Read full review ScreenShots