Are you sure? No, I'm AppAssure!
October 12, 2015
Are you sure? No, I'm AppAssure!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
APPASSURE 5 CORE
Modules Used
- Virtual Standby
- Replication
- DocRetriever for SharePoint Console
- Local Mount Utility
Overall Satisfaction with AppAssure
We use AppAssure as our data backup and data recovery solution. AppAssure is currently being used in our corporate environment and across all of our branch office locations. We are able to do a bare metal restore under 30 minutes and for our mission critical servers we utilize the Virtual Standby feature which [brings back] a dead server back online within minutes. With a secondary AppAssure appliance in our branch office locations, we are able to replicate our mission critical network share server to 2 other sites, which accommodates our disaster recovery issues. Overall, we are very satisfied with the AppAssure appliances we've purchased.
- AppAssure add-on (DocRetriever for SharePoint Console) allows us to recover a particular sub site in SharePoint if deleted.
- AppAssure add-on (Local Mount Utility) allows us to drill into an incremental backup to retrieve a file that was saved on a particular date and be able to mount it and make it into a temporary file recovery share.
- AppAssure Virtual Standby allows us to put our primary domain controller on Virtual Standby in lieu of a disaster.
- I've noticed that pushing an agent update via the console does not always work. It gets frustrating to download the 300mb agent and install it manually across our infrastructure servers.
- Reporting is a big issue, the canned reports aren't really helpful. I wish there was a way to have customized reporting. Also, be able to schedule reporting from the console. I had to schedule it through PowerShell, but most people aren't proficient with PowerShell so it could be quite challenging.
- The Event logs: When there is a failure, it doesn't provide explanation at times of why it failed. If there was a solution/suggested To-Do if a particular error occurred it would save a lot of IT time.
- AppAssure paid for itself in the first year of usage. A user deleted a major file in our SharePoint sub-site, we used the DocRetriever for SharePoint Console and were able to go back to a particular incremental date and retrieved that file.
- One of our file shares crashed and we were able to put the physical server on a virtual standby which saved us hours of imaging and restoring of data. This allowed employees to efficiently continue their daily work without much downtime.
- The offsite replication alone has put an ease on the company in case of any disaster. When Hurricane Sandy hit, we didn't have a solution in place which put us on pins and needles to say the least. But with AppAssure we will be able to have some comfort that all of our mission critical data is being offloaded onto our other sites.
AppAssure was the only solution we evaluated and it worked well for us for what we needed it to do. As far as other products we've looked into Veeam but never evaluated as we needed a solution quickly.