Item: Unitrends
Rating: 8
Author: Matthew DeGrandis

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My Unitrends Recovery Series performs incremental backups on a flexible schedule to accomplish our recovery goals. We can recover to dissimilar hardware, a virtual machine, or simply grab a few files out of a backup if that is what we need. We also use it to store copies of our data offsite. We can test our disaster recovery plans, as well as test individual backups. Our organization relies on it to protect the business in the case of a disaster.

Pros and Cons

Incremental Forever Backups -- Only one full required.
Data Deduplication -- More backups are able to fit on the appliance.

Price is high relative to others.
It is easy to sacrifice capacity to get a lower price -- which means the unit is too small in years to come.

Return on Investment

Backup and restore is easy and straightforward.
Verifying that backups are recoverable is an automated process that is very easy.
Managing reports and using them to "report up" on performance and resource use helps keep management in the loop.

Key Insights

Do you think Unitrends delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Unitrends's feature set?

Did Unitrends live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Unitrends go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Unitrends again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Unitrends has always worked well in my mostly Windows environment. The documentation is well written and informative for all of the scenarios that I've run into, and if it doesn't answer my question or my environment is different, support has always been there to answer those questions. Support is highly recommended as the engineers are very familiar with the product and they go above and beyond for their customers.

The new interface is a large improvement over the old flashed based one.

Unitrends can backup a variety of applications, but be aware that while Exchange and SharePoint can be restored by Unitrends, to do single item recovery requires an additional third party license (Kroll OnTrack) which at the time of purchase wasn't super clear and caused a bit of a kerfuffle during an incident that we had to recover some individual mail items.

Legal Hold is a feature that is likely to cause lots of issues if you use it without fully understanding it. It isn't a bad feature, but a lack of space and not planning for legal hold will cause lots of backups to fail.

Unitrends Backup Review

Overall Satisfaction with Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery