Item: Unitrends
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Unitrends is being used as our primary backup application and key part of our DR and BC plan. It currently is backing up all our on-prem servers and important workstations. We use it across the entire organization and backup approximately 70 different machines. We were able to sunset our tape backup (a very manual process) and keep our data safe in the Unitrends cloud as well as on the recovery appliance itself.

Pros and Cons

Easy to deploy.
Reporting.
Managing jobs.

The recovery of specific items on file level backups can be tedious to find.
Support by phone.
Better logs for why items failed.

Return on Investment

Positive - for what were paying for one SQL server to be a live backup, we were able to shut that down and protect our entire organization using Unitrends. We were able to get rid of the off-site storage costs as well as the manual process of changing out tapes.
The reporting and the BCDR tool for creating a disaster recovery plan is great. A lot of times we need to share our DR/BC plan for RFP's or when working with other businesses, and having a web portal to create and edit the plan and then just print to PDF, makes this whole process a breeze.

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?

Would you buy Unitrends again?

Alternatives Considered

Symantec Backup Exec was the primary tool used for backups for years. We also used Veeam for some Office 365/Exchange backups. Unitrends once configured and set up works very well against the competition. Backup Exec interface was more user friendly. The search tool for exploring backups was much better than Unitrends as well. Unitrends is much faster if you need to restore an entire VM or large file folders. Also once you have Unitrends all set up, it is very low maintenance, it just works. If something fails 9/10 it will correct itself on the next backup that is scheduled to run.

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), Nextiva Business Phone Service, TeamViewer

Likelihood to Recommend

Right now, I would say 7. I think this score is generous considering an issue that happened in their data center where they lost all of our cloud backups for a period of time because of a hardware error on their side. We were credited a year worth of storage costs back, but that could have been a big issue if we needed the data. If you have multiple servers/workstations you need to backup and you just want to set something that just overall works well and you don't have to baby sit very often, then Unitrends is a good choice. Although deployment was easy with agents when we first set it up we had to go back 2 months later and redo a whole bunch of backups and change the backup types because of long backup jobs never finishing or catching up. I think if the implementation team would have spent a little more time on the type of servers and what we were backing up this could have been avoided.

Unitrends has backups trending in the right direction!

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery