Arcserve ShadowProtect vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

If we have a scenario where we need very fast backup/ a lot of backups per hour we tend to go towards ShadowProtect , we have several customers with important servers that we backup each 15 minutes with a VSS consistent snapshot. The continuous incremental option also allows us to create one "full backup" and never again afterwards. This gives us the possibility to give longer retention periods to our customers.

Incentivized

SRM is a must-have tool if your business requires you to failover your VMs to a disaster recovery site and provide valid testing and real-time numbers. Our VP office is always amazed at how easily we are able to satisfy our annual testing and show actual results with time stamps and the sequence of each VM that is up and running. SRM may not be needed in a very small business that does not have the capacity nor the need to have their infrastructure off site in a form of a disaster recovery site.

Incentivized

• Shadowprotect has a relatively simple interface so it's easy to set up.
• Due to the simple UI, it is easy to restore files.
• Imagemanage works fairly well once it's set up and doesn't need much babysitting.

Incentivized

• Easy to build a recovery plan
• Easy to test recovery plans
• Works with storage based replication or non storage based replication

• 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.

Incentivized

• I am not very pleased with the overall licensing cost. It's pretty expensive. Especially if you have a small number of VMs, you are paying a lot.
• We had a little struggle getting our support tickets resolved by VMWare support.

Incentivized

- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster

Incentivized

VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

ShadowProtect is less expensive than some and more robust than others, and for us, provided a fine medium on which to build our support platform. The MSP interface for SPX makes licenses easy to track and deploy, as well as to retire. Overall, have been satisfied with this choice.

Incentivized

Veeam Backup & Replication is slower than VMWare SRM and doesn't suits our RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

Incentivized

• It had a positive ROI due to the ability to offer better backup technology to our clients.
• There is a large up-front fee you need to pay, though, as you need a minimum number of licenses to resell as MSP.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized