Unitrends brings the value, and the nerd too!
March 29, 2021
Unitrends brings the value, and the nerd too!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Unitrends DRaaS
- Unitrends Forever Cloud
- Unitrends Backup Software
- Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery
We are using Unitrends as our primary backup solution for our servers and IT infrastructure. It is exclusively used by the IT staff, and more specifically myself, and one other person. We are using one of their physical appliances to create both on-premise and off-premise backups, utilizing Unitrends' own cloud service that they offer. This cloud service also enables Disaster Recovery as a service functionality basically automatically. I can't really comment on that aspect too much as I have only just gotten the appliance put into place and have not done my test DR failover yet. On the other hand I have already had to use it to rescue some VM's from a host that died. It worked almost perfectly.
- Value -- I was ultimately offered a very compelling package that included the appliance, cloud storage space, and the DRaas option all together for a very good deal.
- Functionality -- I would say their software is definitely aimed at the more technical users -- while it is not difficult to use by any means, they definitely prioritize functionality and verbosity over ease of use. Personally, I am a fan of this style approach.
- Company Culture -- I have only had the product in place for about a month, and was also involved with sales for about another month prior but I have a pretty good sense of the company culture. They are very technically inclined and not afraid to jump into the deeper technical aspects of the product. This also shows through in their documentation and support articles which go into a lot of detail and are actually very useful.
- I am going to come back to the polish issue here as I think there is definitely some room for improvement in QA and overall finish -- don't get me wrong, it is not full of bugs by any means, rather it's "almost there."
- Some of the data points that I think should be very easy to get ahold of are a bit difficult/buried. Stuff like what is the most recent backup available for a given host This should be a column available in many of the views where you are looking at your assets. Also how much storage a given asset is consuming across all of it's backups. I realize the deduplication makes this a bit tricky, but I am sure they could figure something out.
- Automated and regular test restores of backups, although I do believe that this is coming soon.
- I am a bit disappointed that when you have the appliance make an additional backup copy to a "Non Unitrends" storage device, it removes the deduplication and compression benefits so you aren't able to store much history externally unless you invest in a ton of space. I don't know if this is a push for you to get a second appliance so you can have it store the backups there, or what -- but I know it is possible as other vendors can backup to external storage with full inline dedup and compression.
- Well, it has already saved me from one Hyper V host that went belly up one night, while I don't have a dollar amount handy it definitely put me out ahead.
Do you think Unitrends delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Unitrends's feature set?
Yes
Did Unitrends live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Unitrends go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Unitrends again?
Yes
- NAKIVO Backup & Replication, StorageCraft Cloud Backup, Altaro VM Backup and Veeam Backup & Replication
I laid out some simple requirements going into this process. I wanted to be able to back up my Hyper-V environment (just two standalone hosts) including the VM's and the hosts themselves (the OS at least, not the vhd/vhdx files of course), 1-2 bare metal servers that were still straggling along, and then keep a second copy of all of my backups as a failsafe in some cheap cloud storage. Preferably Azure as we already have engagements with them and for the type of usage we'd see (mostly space consumption, very little data transfer OUT of the cloud and very little operations done to the files as they sit in the cloud) Azure was the cheapest. I thought -- pretty simple, right? Well it turns out backing up to the cloud is a bit of a tricky situation here -- as most of the vendors are going to try to get you on their own cloud or use some very specific infrastructure to set it up. Being able to just point the backup engine at some Blob storage was actually a pretty rare feature, oddly enough.
I tested several other software packages including Veeam, Altaro, Nakivo, Storagecraft, and Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS), Out of all of those Altaro and Unitrends were the ones that really stood out. Nakivo was a disaster -- their windows agent, including the Hyper-V host agent doesn't even support installation on server core -- and then after talking to several of their employees about the subject I got a rather clear indication that they really didn't know what they were doing. Veeam seems to be talked up a lot on forums and such but they really didn't have a solution to just archive data in the cloud, you had to build a massive infrastructure in the cloud as well -- totally impractical for a smaller company such as mine. Now Unitrends has some strictness on external backups -- but it is definitely much more workable than Veeam was going to be. Storagecraft got a bit of a short stick here as ultimately they probably should have been one of the final contenders but I engaged them towards the end of the process and I don't think I really gave them a fair shake at it, I had spent two months on this process, and already had two good contenders. We really liked Altaro, their software was polished and just did what you asked it to, but ultimately Unitrends got me by throwing in the Appliance, throwing in some of their cloud storage space, and throwing in their DRaaS solution for so cheap -- I couldn't resist. I'd imagine I would have been happy with either Altaro or Storagecraft as well, though.
I tested several other software packages including Veeam, Altaro, Nakivo, Storagecraft, and Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS), Out of all of those Altaro and Unitrends were the ones that really stood out. Nakivo was a disaster -- their windows agent, including the Hyper-V host agent doesn't even support installation on server core -- and then after talking to several of their employees about the subject I got a rather clear indication that they really didn't know what they were doing. Veeam seems to be talked up a lot on forums and such but they really didn't have a solution to just archive data in the cloud, you had to build a massive infrastructure in the cloud as well -- totally impractical for a smaller company such as mine. Now Unitrends has some strictness on external backups -- but it is definitely much more workable than Veeam was going to be. Storagecraft got a bit of a short stick here as ultimately they probably should have been one of the final contenders but I engaged them towards the end of the process and I don't think I really gave them a fair shake at it, I had spent two months on this process, and already had two good contenders. We really liked Altaro, their software was polished and just did what you asked it to, but ultimately Unitrends got me by throwing in the Appliance, throwing in some of their cloud storage space, and throwing in their DRaaS solution for so cheap -- I couldn't resist. I'd imagine I would have been happy with either Altaro or Storagecraft as well, though.