Likelihood to Recommend It is very easy to use with NFS. Creating new volumes and mounting to servers such as ESXi or Linux is a breeze. It does also support CIFS but it is far less intuitive and requires much more effort. Replicated data is also very simple and robust in the form of SnapVaults or SnapMirrors. This data is either immediately or periodically replicated to a peer FAS in the cluster for retention.
Read full review We have a traditional stack and pretty typical needs as a manufacturer. I have used and evaluated everything out there, but the Unitrends solution fits very well and was competitively priced. I would think if it fits us, it could fit anyone like us with a similar stack.
Read full review Pros The selling point for NetApp FAS is the application and data protection integration capabilities they provide. We have been able to use NetApp FAS in a variety of use cases with a standard set of management tools. NetApp FAS has evolved over the years from just NAS to also include block protocols. At this time they support almost all industry standard protocols. Read full review It has fully automated and customizable dashboards that can run with less administrative attention. It should be able to run on virtual machines or be deployed as a virtual machine within MS Azure or AWS. It's AI-based ransomware detection helps to understand data characteristics and alerts for ransomware attacks. Read full review Cons Deduplication job runs at certain times and creates a large CPU overhead for the system Management of a volumes, disk groups, LUNs, etc. is a burden to manage and is not efficient with storage capacity Upgrades are complicated and not "non-disruptive" Read full review Errors on backup jobs could be more clearly explained. As the administrator of the device for my company, I often don't know what caused an error, and can't tell from the error information what happened or caused the error. Updates of the devices should have an automatic option. It takes to much time to do an update to the devices if updates haven't been maintained. Shutdown and restarting the device should be available from the main UI screen to eliminate some time when doing updates or if you're doing some maintenance on the device. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have grown very attached to the Unitrends appliances and their use for recovery and other file restoration needs as well as data archival, data replication to other appliance and data migration to other servers or long term storage requirements. The appliances work well and the support for them is very good as well.
Read full review Usability It does have a really nice and easy to use web interface to do pretty much anything you need with it. It was very simple to configure our volumes and luns and connect them to our VMWare environment using the interface. It has options to rename, shrink, grow, and other things with our luns and volumes. It was nice and easy to read graphs to see where you stand on your storage usage at a glance.
Read full review I have never used such an easy product that is stable and scalable like Unitrends. I have been running backups for MANY years. On premise, tape, disk, cloud, you name it. Unitrends is very flexible, stable and has incredible reporting features. It's nice when management requests a report and it takes you 5 minutes to run it and dump it to PDF. How can you beat that?
Read full review Reliability and Availability The appliances have been there when we need them and have rarely if ever gone down. Hardware issues have been resolved quickly.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Performance The hardware is adequate and speedy. The user interface responds quickly. Backups complete quickly.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Support Rating NetApp support in Brazil is managed by its partners. We know in other countries, such as the US and NO, they have support directly from Netapp. We have a very good NetApp partner working with us since the beginning, on both the implementation and daily support. Very few cases needed to be escalated to NetApp support, most of the cases are handled and satisfyingly closed by the partner.
Read full review They're incredible, attentive, thorough. They make sure my issue is resolved and follow up. I'm usually behind on giving them a reply or an update. They have always gone above and beyond for me, and I'll continue to do the same for them.
Read full review Online Training It was sufficient to get started. It was not super deep. We called support often to get going.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Implementation Rating The Unitrends employees involved in the installation were very friendly and knowledgeable. A certain degree of hiccups can be expected during any installation but never shook my confidence because of the friendly and knowledgeable team that was assigned to my project.
Read full review Alternatives Considered NetApp stacked nicely and gave enterprise-level usability for snapshot-based backups. Our previous RPO was several hours. It was selected prior to me arriving at the company, but It was selected for the hardware refreshes due to its compatibility with several other vendors, like CommVault and VMware.
Read full review Symantec Backup Exec was the primary tool used for backups for years. We also used Veeam for some Office 365/Exchange backups. Unitrends once configured and set up works very well against the competition. Backup Exec interface was more user friendly. The search tool for exploring backups was much better than Unitrends as well. Unitrends is much faster if you need to restore an entire VM or large file folders. Also once you have Unitrends all set up, it is very low maintenance, it just works. If something fails 9/10 it will correct itself on the next backup that is scheduled to run
Read full review Scalability Once you exceed the capacity of the appliances, you have to forklift a new appliance. This is very expensive.
Troy Funte Senior Information Technology Audit Manager
Read full review Return on Investment The speed of file recovery is the biggest positive impact. Recovering from a ransomware attack in minutes is something you can certainly brag about. Integration with products like Exchange and SQL can certainly speed up normal day to day processes. Not just in backup recovery situations either. Redundant paths make migrations and updates very easy with no downtime. Read full review It has saved some deleted file server data for our business department. We have lost some reports for the business department due to an overlooked setting that make the backup reports look great, but the server was not being backed up in reality. Less anxiety for the IT department, we have backup plan and that is worth a lot to us. Read full review ScreenShots