Hornetsecurity VM Backup vs. OpenText Availability

Altaro VM Backup is great if you have 1 or 2 VMs that aren't backed up by any other means. I initially had some issues with setting it up so it backed up to a NAS, and sometimes the host wouldn't sync to the client. There probably wouldn't be an issue if the host system is the backup location. The interface and configuration were pretty intuitive and gave you a lot of information on the status of your backups.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Allows for easy review and updating during replication processes. The Portal is user-friendly and very accessible with little user training.
• Allows us to know when we have errors in replication and actions needed.
• Their support is very quick and reliable in the event we have questions or issue.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• License management is poor and the online system is very restrictive, We are using a one time "Move" product that has a fixed life ... but sometimes in a small team other high priority tasks come along.
• We lost all access to all licenses in the portal and all support because we hadn't used them in ninety days. Very poor service. We did get access back eventually but it took a lot of "bargaining".
• Failover isn't always as smooth as it could be. VMDKs don't release properly and the move fails and has to be done manually. Not hard just frustrating. VMWare to VMWare.

Incentivized

It simply works and it is making our lives easier. The renewal process is also really good

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Cabonite Availability is a very practical and useful tool that can help any business weather any type of IT disaster. The ease and quickness of restoring data helps us provide as seamless an experience as possible. Many times our customers will never know there was an outage. This brings confidence in our brand and improves our organization's standing and reputation.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Altaro has really designed their product so well that you can honestly implement this within a couple of minutes

Incentivized

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.

Zerto is a very nice tool when performing virtual to virtual replication. If you were to add a physical server in the mix, it would not be able to handle that server or the data on it. Veeam is a way is similar to Zerto where it only has the ability to handle virtual to virtual replication. The big difference is that it's not continuous replication. It uses a snapshot technology to grab the changes from the last snapshot and replicate that over.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It has helped us to service our customers
• It has helped us provide tools for re-sellers
• It has allowed our customers to keep their critical apps running in the event of a disaster

Incentivized