Unitrends Recovery Applicances are excellent, if your budget is up to it
August 09, 2016

Unitrends Recovery Applicances are excellent, if your budget is up to it

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance

We use the backup and recovery appliance for our primary server farm. One of the benefits it offers is its ability to backup across a multiplicity of platforms and devices, not just VMs. We utilize everything from stand-alone devices, to NAS, SAN and purpose driven VMs and it is able to consolidate the backup and recovery of all platforms into one simple console and archive.
  • Cross Platform backups are easily done and managed in line with those from VMWare or any other device.
  • We have a drive bay connected for daily, scheduled archival, so that a copy of all recent images can be taken offsite. It writes these archives at an impressive speed, ensuring that despite the size of the server environment, I can have a full, fresh DR copy taken offsite every day.
  • File restoration is quite straightforward and the execution options are simple to use.
  • When backing up a VM directly, which is necessary for time, it can be rather cumbersome to do a single file restore, as you must build an image of the entire machine at the desired point in time, then browse it (which is often rather slow loading) and finally copy out the file in question. The copy process is astonishingly slow, particularly given the speed at which it pulls data in the backup. I'd really like just to be able to drill down to a location and select the file to restore and specify a destination, as I do with any NAS devices, etc.
  • While the speed of writing to the removable drives in the daily archive is currently excellent it has not always been so. Not sure what the tech did this last time, I called in but write speeds are now finally where there really should be for this process, we have been struggling with this, on and off for what seems like 2 years. We get it working again and in a month or two, the time shoots up by 30-40% out of the blue. Sometimes it gets fixed, sometimes we have to keep trying in different tickets to get it back where it was. Stabilizing this function would be awesome.
  • Day to day backups are efficient and easily managed, this has cut down on IT time managing the day to processes. Automated messages, etc., also help streamline the amount of IT time needing to be dedicated to the backups.
  • We have had a couple recovery scenarios to this point. File recovery has been ok, but device recovery was terrible. In fairness, this is because we were led to believe by a third party sales rep that we had the hardware/licensing needed for live state recovery but did not. Even so, when recovering a full machine, the write times were abysmal compared to the backups on same devices. Again, purportedly it would have all been better with a higher-end device, but the cost would have been out of our reach.

Symantec Backup Exec's support and functionality are quite poor. Not much else to say there.

VEEAM is simple, easy to use and quite cost effective - the catch is that it cannot support the varied platforms and devices that the Unitrends device can.

A Unitrends device, with its degree of client compatibility is ideal for diverse, multi-device, multi-platform environments.

The largest drawback to the appliance however is its cost. Not just the initial cost of the device itself, but making sure that your host hardware has enough expanded capability and licensing to support the more useful and robust features of the appliance, such as live recovery, etc. The ongoing support costs are also high.

Overall, it is a great solution, IF you have the resources and ongoing technology budget to back it up.

Unitrends Feature Ratings

Universal recovery
9
Instant recovery
4
Recovery verification
6
Business application protection
7
Multiple backup destinations
9
Incremental backup identification
9
Deduplication and file compression
7
Snapshots
9