Likelihood to Recommend In situations where business continuity needs are high, ShadowProtect backups provide the ability to keep operations running with very minimal downtime, even in situations like crypto-locked data. If a backup server is set up in an environment to resume a live server from backup, this is even more helpful. In situations where clients don't care as much about quickly recovering their data, they can go without a solution like this.
Read full review It's quite well suited for a medium to large size VMWare virtualization infrastructure where your production infrastructure can be failed over to a disaster recovery site. There are other cheaper options for a smaller budget business. Also, for a non mission critical virtual infrastructure, you can simply use VM backups such as Veeam backups for restoring failed VMs
Read full review Pros You can virtualize your backups using Virtualbox, a free program that works on any PC. Backups are versatile, and you can back up to any location you'd like. Alerting can be set up for failed backups. Read full review Easy configuration and setup. Testing of a particular VM or datastore with several VMs is easy. Auto configuration of IPs makes the process even easier. Read full review Cons The replication offsite can have issues over time. It takes manual involvement to keep it working right. SPX remote management isn't easy out of the box. Read full review It’s unfortunate, but more and more, the quality of VMware’s products and the technical support teams behind them has degraded significantly. We have opened several support requests within the last few months and ended up resolving a large majority ourselves due to the poor performance of their remote teams. VMware is suffering from the same illness that’s affecting multiple U.S. technology firms, in that their focus has shifted completely away from their customers and moved to pleasing investors. In doing so, clients suffer because they do not get properly tested products and the support teams behind them are very weak and overwhelmed. We worked close to a month trying to get SRM V6.5 to work. We have worked with many previous versions of SRM in the past while using HP EVAs, NetApps and Hitachi arrays, and we can honestly say that we are greatly disappointed with this release and the company. We escalated right up to engineering, but their response times were brutally slow; the technicians were juniors at best. As a technology leader, the last thing you want during a DR is to be dealing with a company that just can't deliver. SRM is not cheap, and you would expect much better products and support from VMware. If you are comparing products, try other companies like Veeam... We ended up using them instead, the setup and execution was easy and seamless, and they answered all our questions quickly and efficiently. They actually do care about their clients. Read full review Likelihood to Renew - easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster
Read full review Usability VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.
Read full review Support Rating We don’t need support often, but when we do, the support has been strong. Sometimes it is hard to determine how to access support for the exact issue we are having. There are a decent forum and online ticketing system. Support for the cloud center seems to be provided only by phone, though.
Read full review Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Speed, we rely on Shadowprotect to provide us with fast backups and also backups that are smaller in size compared to the other products.
Read full review Entertained Veeam, however with SRM's tight integration and "brand" it was an easy decision. The cost for a 25 server license also weighed in the decision for using a VMware product. Plus I am a VMware fan and feel this option to go with SRM will transcend jobs.
Read full review Return on Investment We have been with Shadowprotect for 5 years and are now only moving off of them due to limited functionality and Shadowprotect doubling our billing. The product now requires a lot more babysitting so I have one person just stuck managing backups, which is not a fulfilling job and hard to keep someone in that seat. While Shadowprotect has been fantastic for years, it is time for us to move on to something that makes financial sense and requires less labour. Storagecraft Cloud is fairly expensive compared to competitors. Read full review The biggest positive is that we have a data recovery solution that we can test and verify in a live condition. Prior to this we were only hoping we could recover from a disaster. We've been only running for 4 months and haven't had to use SRM. Read full review ScreenShots