Unitrends - excellent product and support
Updated July 12, 2016
Unitrends - excellent product and support
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
Divisional use (several departments) to backup a mix of physical and virtual machines and database servers. Previously, we were using a tape backup system from another vendor and were not backing up everything on a regular basis. We have recently added a Unitrends RXDA (archive to removable disks) unit for storing a copy of our weekly backups at a offsite vault location.
- Unitrends support has a great reputation and is provides many channels to work with them.
- Licensing is very straightforward and flexible. Archiving is included. Configuration was a breeze - we were up and running in half a day.
- Solid platform and very stable. Easy to update and push out new versions to clients. New non-Flash interface is nicely done (dashboards).
- If there is an sync issue with an INCR backup on MSSQL, the next scheduled backup will automatically convert to a FULL and resolve itself.
- For those one-off backups during the workday, it would be nice to have the ability to "throttle back" the throughput as not to saturate the network connection and impact users. There is a work-around to overcome with (with another backup of a different server) but it's not optimum.
- After implementing an "incremental forever" policy with backups every 2 hours on our file share, we have increased the available backups that are available to our end users and recover key deleted or changed files.
- We are now able to backup our databases during the workday (7am-7pm) with hourly incrementals along with associated flat files from our document management system.
While systems from any of these three vendors would be a dramatic improvement over our current state, after participating in various product demos, viewing online resources and performing other comparisons, Unitrends provided what appeared to be the best offering of features, capabilities, flexibility and the most intuitive GUI (graphical user interface). Unitrends also had a licensing model that fit our needs now and allowed for flexibility backup clients and features may indeed change in the future.
Deciding factors:
- No limits licensing – license based on (compressed) backup (6TB) data retention.
- Backup is the company’s primary focus – not just a business unit.
- Provides a single solution for Physical and Virtual servers – with support (via SAS cable) for our Tape drives.
- Can backup to Vendor cloud, private cloud or third-party clouds.
- Ability to create test environments from Production servers (P2V, V2V) thus also testing backups.
- Target-based, byte-level (content-aware) de-duplication.
- Support for encryption of data at rest as well as in-flight.
- Windows instant recovery.
- Protects Physical and Virtual servers (including our Hyper-V servers with support for CBT (Change Block
- Tracking).
- Support for NAS/SAN backups (via agentless-based protection).
- Provided us with a template to determine our true backup needs.
- Incremental forever technology now enables point in time recoveries and without the cost of weekly fulls.
- Bare metal restores – similar and dissimilar, physical and virtual (heterogeneous).
- Appliances performs double-duty as a disaster recover server.
- Quote included installation services to cover all our servers.
- Strong support for archiving to Tape and rotational drives.
- Very satisfied Users and solid reputation when researched internet message boards and blogs.
- Provided a reference: NM Junior College (Hobbs) – using Unitrends appliance for about 5 years.
- Recent purchase by Sandoval County.
- SNMP notifications for additional monitoring with our PRTG software.