Unitrends Three Year Product Assessment
September 16, 2016
Unitrends Three Year Product Assessment
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
We use our Unitrends Recovery appliance as both a primary and secondary backup device for dozens of servers. Less critical servers that do not require historical backups are protected primarily by the Unitrends device. More critical servers that require historical data backup also use autoloading DLT tape units in conjunction with Unitrends. The Unitrends backups are set up to provide hourly file change protection where the tape units are more of a week and month end full backup.
This solution is being used for a single Business Unit location protecting nearly 30 servers both physical and virtual.
This solution is being used for a single Business Unit location protecting nearly 30 servers both physical and virtual.
- Very fast and reliable backup and restoring of changed files throughout the work day. Simple interface is relatively quick and easy to use for restoring files and folders.
- The base linux OS that the appliance runs on has been extremely reliable and has never crashed. That same reliability can be said for the graphical user interface.
- Recent hardware updates to all of the appliance models has made the hardware itself much more reliable. As an example early models did not have enterprise class hard drives for the RAID array. That change was made a couple years ago and since then no hard drive failures have been encountered.
- Additional hardware improvements to processing power and additional memory made significant improvements to the performance of the system and reduced load from multiple backup job streams by nearly 50%
- Excellent and reliable backups for Windows based servers and PC's but difficult to understand and configure backups for IBM AS400 and Unix based systems.
- Too frequent of updates needed for the clients and appliance OS. The updates aren't always required but if you do not keep up with them they can really build up. It's nice to see development and constant improvements however.
- A more smooth client install/push to servers. At times this can fail requiring a more manual copy of the client setup files to the server and running them locally. This could potentially be fixed in recent updates that I have not yet installed.
- Excellent for use of recovering from ransomeware changed files on network shares very quickly. With hourly or even shorter time period backups you can restore in most cases the most recent good version of files. This is simply not possible with a tape unit.
- Had our primary email server completely crash at the end of a day that was on an old hardware platform. Was able to build a virtual server quickly from a template on a totally different hard platform and restore all of our email system (500gb) within 4-5 hour period and have email working perfectly again by that next morning as users came into work. The users had no idea a problem ever occurred.
Evaluated Netapp which was a bit too pricey and had previous experience with LiveVault (Iron Mountain) which had performance issues at times. The Unitrends provided nice demonstrations, has good customer support, and was willing to work hard at keeping price within my budget.