Arcserve UDP 7200 Quick, simple and fast backup appliance
Rating: 8 out of 10
November 03, 2020
JR
Vetted Review
Verified User
4 years of experience
Our Arcserve UDP 7200 Appliance is used as the primary backup device for our organization. It also replicates to a second of the same device at an off-site location. It stores all of our files, email and server information, and is our primary disaster recovery tool.
- Simple setup. It was really quick and simple to get the device connected and set up with Windows server built in the initial connection was very familiar. The setup wizard for the backup software was easy to walk through.
- Fast backups. Of the three solutions we demo'd the Arcserve appliance was by far the fastest to produce a complete backup. And the incrementals from then on are also very fast - it causes almost no network disruption as the backups are complete[d] so quickly.
- Fast, simple restores. Having restored a SQL database with it one time, a business critical one, I can attest to the ease of restoring. It was simple to find the point to restore from, and to push it to the server that it needed to be on.
- Great granularity on notifications. Being able to set up the number of notifications to indicate errors or problems is very helpful. It rarely has any issues (mostly it's my network that's the problem!), but when it does it lets you know.
Cons
- Scalability. Main issue is each appliance has a finite space for backups, and can't be increased on the box itself without replacing it with another appliance completely.
- Onboard interface. Doesn't have an interface that's accessible via the web natively. While that's great for security, it is a little awkward if you need to access it from offsite.
- Restored a SQL database for our CRM system very quickly. Without which, we would have been floundering and unable to contact our donors, and as a charity this would essentially have cut off much of our revenue. So it pretty much paid for itself in this one incident!
- Reduced downtime restoring files when users delete them. We had tapes before and they take so long to do a restore from. The local disk based appliance made restoring a quick and simple task.
Barracuda had the best console of the three we evaluated. Cloud hosted it was the easiest to access. However, it took forever to do the initial seeding backup, and then the nightly backups ran over into the next day. It was just so slow to do the backups - we never even tried a restore. The resulting backups also seemed to take up a significant amount of the appliances space, it was almost 3/4 full from the get go.
Unitrends did not have natively a granular email restore option, it had a third-party option, but that was not something we were interested in. It also took a long time to run the backups.
Arcserve was the fastest by far, [as] it did not fill up as much (way better deduplication) and it had a built-in granular email restore. While I wish it had a cloud console, overall it had the most important features we were looking for.
Unitrends did not have natively a granular email restore option, it had a third-party option, but that was not something we were interested in. It also took a long time to run the backups.
Arcserve was the fastest by far, [as] it did not fill up as much (way better deduplication) and it had a built-in granular email restore. While I wish it had a cloud console, overall it had the most important features we were looking for.