Item: Unitrends
Rating: 10
Author: Craig Chapman

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization uses Unitrends for our on-premises disaster recovery solution. While we have some services that are cloud-based, those have their own disaster recovery mechanisms. Unitrends provides a very good 1-2-3 solution for our aging on-premises servers and has been invaluable as a peace of mind solution allowing for simple roll-back capabilities during upgrades as well as secure knowledge that all core systems are safe if disaster should strike.

Pros and Cons

Integration with SQL Server databases for full and incremental backups
Agents are easily deployed and upgraded for VM hosts
Pulling backups and either deploying or performing in-place restore jobs is straight-forward and intuitive
Regular reports of success/failed backup jobs makes managing any issues easy to diagnose

Like other solutions, Unitrends does require [the] use of agents for hypervisor hosts and database servers
There is an upfront cost for the on-premises hardware (though they do allow you to roll your own)
Some on-premises configurations need to be done via console/SSH rather than through the web interface (such as setting up TLS)

Return on Investment

The largest return would come if we experienced a disaster and needed to rapidly restore servers. That hasn't happened yet, but testing shows this would work well.
No additional time or manual attention has been needed to ensure servers are securely backed up, freeing my team to focus on other projects.
At times where partial or complete restoration has been requested or needed, the process was rapid and this service wasn't a source of friction.

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery has been very well-suited to ensuring secure backups of all of our on-premises servers. Using its agents, it is able to seamlessly backup our SQL Server databases, virtual machines, and their hosts (both Windows and Linux) and has proven to be capable [of] quickly restoring existing backups. Once the initial configuration is completed and the backup schedules are optimized, it runs in the background with virtually no attention required.

Unitrends - A Solid Backup Partner As Simple As 1-2-3

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery