Saved our bacon and paid for itself within weeks of the purchase!
Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance
- The deduplication the appliance does is pretty amazing. At a minimum I believe we are getting at least a 65% reduction of space we need. On one of our servers the deduplication is in the neighborhood of 80%. This has helped us look at the performance of that server, which was really good, but the disk utilization was higher than it should have been. We used this data to determine some changes to the application the server hosted and were able to make changes which helped the entire situation.
- The Unitrends appliance is really fast. I can backup servers in a fraction of the time my previous backup did. Restoring data is pretty lickety-split. Our backup window is reduced by more than two-thirds what it was! That's significant.
- The administration of the Unitrends backup is very straight forward and easy to use. Our old backup software had a lot of options right up front, options we never used and in some cases wondered why they were even there. Keep It Simple, I wear enough hats in this job that I really don't need to spend time looking at things that don't matter to me.
- The new admin interface is good for initial setup and checking the status of current running jobs, but lacks details. Switching to the legacy interface to see options I need in order to set up a restore, or special backup can be annoying sometimes.
- I wish there was a better way to anticipate/estimate how long a bigger backup job will take.
- I wish there was a way to push agent updates to all my servers from the Unitrends appliance.
- Almost immediately after implementing our Unitrends backup appliance we were hit with a ransomware attack. Recovery took less than a day as we were simply able to delete the affected file structure and restore from backup. We lost about a half day, maybe a little more for some departments but for the most part the recovery time was very minimal. The old backup system would have taken days to get everything restored from tape. That would have really hurt. Thank God we finished our implementation when we did.
- The time spent changing backup tapes and driving the old tapes off site was just plain annoying, over the course of a year the costs of doing that added up to over a thousand dollars between drive time and paying employees mileage. This is an easy cost to bear but just not having to do this on a regular basis seems to have increased the morale of that employee as it's no longer a task he dreads, this goes a long way to improved employee satisfaction and retention which is invaluable.
- The device just works. We no longer spend hours every week messing with the backups, fixing what went wrong, what Windows update stepped on what part of the backup software on the server or the client. Instead we spend a couple minutes of the day looking at the backup report and unless there's a problem, which there rarely is, we go on with the day.
- Veeam, Arcserve and AppAssure
We did our homework and boy are we happy. We looked at Backup Exec, Veeam, Arcserve, and AppAssure.
Veeam was probably the top competitor and when I looked at it while visiting another institution it looked and sounded very stable. The techs who worked with it swore by it, but when I asked about support the answer was they used TechNet, and user group sites. When I asked about phone support they indicated they stayed away from that because there were costs associated with it. Next.
We looked at Arcserve, Backup Exec, and AppAssure. We were coming from Backup Exec and already had a sour taste in our mouth, I had used previous versions of Arcserve and although the interface had improved the cost and need for agents for every little thing was a turn-off. AppAssure was really nice but the price was not. By far the best product for us is Unitrends Recovery Series. Its a rock solid product, easy to use, and the price is something we can live with.