Hornetsecurity VM Backup vs. TBMR

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

Incentivized

During the Sandy storm, I was told to get over 200 servers ready in case we declare a disaster. I was able to spin over 190 servers in five days. I recovered servers using TBMR recovery. I restored each server using TBMR. After the server was restored at Sungard, I powered on the server without NIC to prevent a production issue with duplicate a name or IP. I validated each server after restore to make sure OS is working correctly and all data had been restored. I did not restore images due to the size of storage. Overall, it worked out and we were ready before Sandy struck. We did not go into disaster mode, but my management was impressed that this product worked as described.

• 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

• It works 99.9% all the time if you setup correctly. In some instance there was issue was disk was not able to read partition. I called support and upload the log file. They told me during recovery point to new modify file instead of reading from backup configuration. It work and able to recover quickly
• The support is really great. They are always ready to help in any situation.
• During Sandy storm, we mentioned our challenges. They told us there will two support engineer will be stand by for support any time. Just let them know when you need support.
• Support is staff is very knowledgeable. They willing to go extra mile all the time

• 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

• There have been so bugs in the software. They provided me the next day with a temporary fix. In the next release, they will fix the bug permanenly.
• As far as we use it, I do not see too much on functionality.
• Setup is unique in every organization. It has been working well so far.

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

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

Support is great. They go beyond the normal service. I called a few times in the middle of the night for support. I was not able to recover some machines. They called back with half an hour and worked through it with me. They wanted to make sure I was able to recover the server. They are always willing to help.

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.

When I started TSM/Spectrum Protect over 13 years ago, disaster recovery was not funded to much. Once all regulatory requirements and auditing became more visible, management decided to start disaster recovery. I looked into one other BMR product. It required lots of manual processes to build WinPE iso images. I needed to build ISO images for each version of the TSM Client. At that time, we had over 350 Windows and Linux servers. There were over 10 different TSM Clients running. It was difficult to maintain all the different ISOs. I am only one admin doing the backup job and other duties. It was not possible to keep. I started to shop around for a different BMR solution for TSM. I came across Cristie. We did POC testing for 1 month. We covered HP physical servers to IBM hardware and vice versa. It worked without any issue. We also tried to recover HP physical servers from DL360 to DL380 and others. It works every time. At that time my management got assurance that this is a good product for investment. We started with 300 licenses. Now we have over 200 Physical and 600 virtual license

• 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

• As of today, we are recovering servers without any issue. There is no 100% success. Some servers backup corrupted data and are restored the same way. It is called Garbage in Garbage out. So far management wants to continue the use of this product.
• My management wants to use TBMR or any other backup.
• Every year we are buying more licenses.