NAKIVO Backup & Replication vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is well suited for a variety of scenarios. Firstly, it is ideal for businesses with virtualized environments, such as VMware or Hyper-V, as it offers seamless backup and recovery solutions tailored to these platforms. Secondly, organizations with a mix of virtual, physical, and cloud environments can benefit from NAKIVO's ability to provide unified data protection across these platforms. Additionally, businesses requiring fast and reliable disaster recovery capabilities will find NAKIVO Backup & Replication valuable, thanks to its site recovery and orchestration features.However, there are scenarios where NAKIVO may be less appropriate. For organizations with exclusively physical infrastructure and no virtualized environments, the full range of NAKIVO's features may not be utilized to its fullest potential. Similarly, companies with limited data storage requirements may not fully benefit from NAKIVO's deduplication and compression capabilities.

Starwind VTL is a great solution for customers that want the benefits of a physical tape library without the hefty price tag and the manual intervention required when changing tapes as it is automated. In addition, Starwind VTL virtual tapes are "air-gapped" as they are in LTO format.

• Can be installed natively on nas appliances leveraging the use of underutilized appliances. No need to install the software on Windows or Linux Servers.
• Backup natively Vmware Virtual Machines and File Shares (you need to buy the right license modules).
• Destination storage for backups (or of the backup copies) can be Microsoft shares, Amazon S3, Wasabi, Backblaze and remotely to other sites using their transporter vm.
• To not overload the system with overlapping jobs, they can be chained one after the other.
• Rapid add/remove/reorder priority of vm to backup and their backup archive. Jobs can be easily changed or chained.
• Quick support service

Incentivized

• Allows you to use Veeam and other software that uses Virtual Tape Libraries while getting rid of actual tape drives and tapes
• Backblaze B2 implementation is great - keeps storage costs low while automating backups to the cloud storage
• Low cost and great support by the Starwind technical team
• Feature-rich and in constant development

• Backups have the option of "screenshot verification". Screenshot verification doesn't always work for us when our vmtools is out of date. If we are on an older version of VMware and that version of vmtools is up to date, NAKIVO still thinks it is out of date.

Incentivized

• Set-up is confusing.

It is a product that contains most of the features of its big competitors but at an affordable price for small businesses. In addition, the support is very good even if they only have support in English. Another important factor is its compatibility with NAS devices, which greatly simplifies deployment. The implementation is simple and in a matter of minutes you can define the first copy Jobs

Their support is great and the interface is not as user friendly

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is very easy to set up. I did it by myself, and it went perfectly. Online documents are very well written, and also the tech support asked to help me set it up. I want to do it by myself and the setup process is very easy to do. The connection to your VM and servers is very easy to do.

The initial setup took some time, however, with the help of the Starwind technical team, we were able to set it up from start to finish including seamlessly adding it to our existing backup solution. After that, there was no need for any additional setup or troubleshooting.

The support is fast and perfect. If u have any questions, you can contact the support team via mail or chat and you always get a fast answer. You can also find a lot of help in the FAQ in the help center to resolve your problems. Anytime I had to contact the support, they helped me and solved my problem.

Great and reliable product with little need for support

It is very easy to do in all the formats in which it is implemented, whether as an appliance, in a windows machine, or an implementation in NAS. I only use the appliance one, but I have tried all of them in trial mode to know which one interested me more.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication stands out as a more cost-effective and robust solution compared to Veeam ONE. With competitive pricing and a comprehensive feature set including incremental backups, global deduplication, LAN-free data transfer, and built-in WAN acceleration, NAKIVO offers efficient data protection and optimized storage usage. Its user-friendly interface and streamlined setup process make it appealing for organizations with limited IT resources. Additionally, NAKIVO's support for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHV further enhances its versatility. When evaluating data protection solutions, NAKIVO's affordability, robustness, and ease of use make it an attractive choice for businesses seeking a comprehensive and cost-effective backup solution.

We've looked at physical tape backups, however, the infrastructure is too costly compared to Starwind VTL and it also requires manual changing of tapes that users will not want to do or forget to do. With VTL, it works exactly like a physical tape library with the same benefits and full automation.

The pricing for VM backups is good value for money as it does not limit how many VM's per socket. This works well for smaller sites with simple backup requirements. Physical machine backup pricing would more attractive with a sliding scale based on the number of physical machines.

Incentivized

I contacted a few times Nakivo representatives, once for technical doubt and the other ones for commercial ones. Both support services are fast and reliable.

Incentivized

• One of our contributors has permanently deleted worksheets from our file server. From Nakivo, we were able to recover all the data in less than 10 minutes.
• An authentication server was encrypted by ransomware, through NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we recover the entire server within 1 hour.

Incentivized

• ROI was immediate as we got rid of expensive sneakernet backups with hard drives in a Pelican case
• One-time cost of the product is very cost-effective
• Support contracts are reasonable and we received excellent support throughout
• We have much better peace-of-mind with our data being protected better