Item: Unitrends
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a K12 Educational institution that is extremely limited in our outside bandwidth. We utilize two clusters of VMWare hosts with a wide variety of VM's. We setup Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery to backup our entire VMware infrastructure. On occasion we have for a myriad of reasons had to recover various VM's from backup(s) locally or from the Cold Copy remote site.

Pros and Cons

The CBT(Changed Block Tracking) within VMWare seems to be exceedingly fast.
The recovery process whole VM works well.
The quick and dirty mount a filesystem from some point in the past is handy to grab a small change.
The Cold Copy uses a VPN so that sensitive data is protected in transit.

Some of the error messages are too terse or simply say failed. Had they displayed a useful message could of saved me a support call.
Updates have been problematic via the GUI, logging in the the console is much faster and give you more details as to where it is in the update process.
Managing the retention policy(s) can take some trial and error to get the maximum retention.

Return on Investment

We have more than recovered our investment in terms of man hours saved.

Key Insights

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

Alternatives Considered

I believe that we originally became a Unitrends customer as they purchased our existing vendor. Once we redeployed with a pair of Unitrends VM's our overall speed and reliability of our backups improved.

Other Software Used

cPanel

Likelihood to Recommend

I have had good luck with recovering VM's and/or files with our installation. The job(s) I have set up run as expected and as soon as a VM has completed being backed up it is immediately put in the queue to be copied over our private fiber link to a data recovery center offsite.

A large VM with multiple drives and a good deal of daily changes can take some time to recover, as we use the Full Backup, Incremental Forever approach. A recovery has to first recover that last "Full Backup" and/or "Synthetic Full Backup" and then layer over the subsequent changes. Unfortunately, this can take some time to complete. But at the same time, I have had all my restored VMs boot and run as expected.

Users and Roles

2 - Both are in IT.

Unitrends Backup with limited external bandwidth available. Cold copy to data recovery center.

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery