Unitrends vs. VMware Site Recovery (DRaaS)

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.

Incentivized

VMware Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery tools are well suited for customers who are heavily integrated with vSphere and VMs for their on-premises data centers today. VMware Cloud on AWS is great for customers who do not have DR sites and want to leverage the public cloud to build a DR site on demand quickly.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Integration with VMware environments
• Simple to use for current VMware admins

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• vSphere replication not as feature rich as storage replication
• Third party software necessary if looking into public cloud

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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?

Incentivized

The appliances have been there when we need them and have rarely if ever gone down. Hardware issues have been resolved quickly.

Incentivized

The hardware is adequate and speedy. The user interface responds quickly. Backups complete quickly.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

VMware support is typically outstanding, of course, they have multiple departments, and you need to work with the specific teams to get advanced support for things specific to VMware Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery. In contrast, other companies that deal directly with that technology may be more responsive to those specifics. Typically VMware is excellent and helpful in critical outages. For smaller to medium issues, it can take some time to get addressed appropriately.

Incentivized

It was sufficient to get started. It was not super deep. We called support often to get going.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

VMware is software and typically hardware agnostic, this does require extra design and consideration versus putting in backup appliances. Some other solutions are a software as well and can be layered on top of vSphere to enhance existing environments. We need to weigh the benefits of licensing versus software costs and the management cost of having multiple tools.

Incentivized

Once you exceed the capacity of the appliances, you have to forklift a new appliance. This is very expensive.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Requires running vSphere at target DR sites
• Potential licensing cost for cold/standby locations

Incentivized