Unitrends looks great on paper, but ...
September 12, 2016
Unitrends looks great on paper, but ...
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
We currently use Unitrends appliances at 5 locations. We are primarily located on the East Coast so disaster planning is usually related to tropical storm activity. It's also related to any unknown disaster (natural or otherwise). We were looking for a cost effective all in one solution. Unitrends allows us to backup locally, cross-replicate backups, and utilize the Unitrends appliance as a recovery device (in some cases). Cloud based backups were considered, but we wanted to keep all of our data within our control. We are using a 'private cloud' configuration to replicate local backups to remote locations.
- Decent user interface to create backups. Management of backup schedules is relatively simple.
- Ability to keep your data under your control, private cloud replication is good if you have multiple sites.
- The Unitrends appliance can act as a server in certain cases. Physical servers can be "spun up" on the appliance while you fix or replace down servers, saving the cost of redundant hardware for recovery.
- The replication process is damn near impossible to set up yourself. Even the installation tech at Unitrends was having difficulty setting up cross-replication between two sites. Replication often breaks after Unitrends updates.
- Regardless of what a salesperson tells you... Replication can only be pushed to one site. You can not send Site A backups to Site B and C for redundancy, only to one of them.
- While physical machines can be brought up on a Unitrends server, Virtual Machines can not. A separate hyper-visor server must be in place to host your VMs. The hyper-visor mounts the VHDX from the Unitrends box.
- Various bugs get fixed and reappear with new updates. For example, hot-fixes that get applied to our systems, are not consistently incorporated into releases.
- We have used Unitrends to do file level restores of critical data.