Unitrends brings the value, and the nerd too!

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.