Unitrends in Higher Education
September 07, 2016
Unitrends in Higher Education
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
We use the Unitrends devices to back up the physical and virtual servers under business and finance. This system replaced an outdated, and ill-sized tape backup solution from Symantec, using Dell hardware, and stored offsite at Iron Mountain. This solution worked, but was slow, inconsistent, and did not provide us a VMWare Aware solution. Moving to Unitrends, I was able to integrate the system with AD for user authentication, VMWare for VM full and incremental backups, and our physical systems for bare-metal backups.
Pros
- The solution is both VM and database aware, allowing for application specific backup and restores managed through one device.
- Unitrends offers a cloud-backup solution that allows a user to seemlessly store Unitrends backups offsite. They'll even send you a unit with your backups on it if you need it.
- We used the system to manage our Oracle and SQL Server backups and restores. The Oracle piece uses RMAN to create the restore points, so they stay in the RMAN catalog on the database server. SQL Server backup and restores are absolutely seamless and simple to manage.
Cons
- The biggest problem we faced with this, and the reason we are looking to migrate off of this solution is simply the hardware. The hard drives used in our $45k dollar appliances are consumer grade and fail continuously. While Unitrends will replace them after some troubleshooting, it does not site well with me that an Enterprise piece of equipment uses this grade of hardware.
- The support has gone south in the past couple of years. Before Unitrends was acquired, the support was phenomenal; you would call, someone would answer, and your problem would be taken care of. Since the acquisition, service responses are lacking at best. Many of our requests go through levels of support tiers before we finally get a resolution.
- The support and maintenance costs are astronomical. Our current two appliances cost around $16k/year.
- We have been able to recover lost files from randomware and user error multiple times easily and efficiently.
- At one point, due to a database issue on the device, we lost all backups on the unit and had to start over...
- Testing restores of VMWare VM's is very simple: point the restore at our vCenter server and go.
- I have had to restore complete systems before and was able to do so successfully. This was both VM's and physical machines.
- Veeam Backup & Replication
We are currently migrating to Veeam for our production environment, as the costs for the software and hardware are far less than Unitrends, and the software offers the same protection that we currently enjoy. When comparing the two products, I could not see a reason to continue with Unitrends given the issues we have had with our current boxes.
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