Vembu so-so
Updated March 09, 2018

Vembu so-so

Bruce Redfern | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Vembu BDR Suite

Easy setup of backups although the available selections are not well explained within the product. Restoring is also not as intuitive as it could be. Reporting seems adequate but often reports things like "backup failed because backup is in progress" without telling you what backup was actually in progress and without giving any hints as to how to fix the issue.
We use the NetworkImage, ImageBackup, and VMBackup products associated with VembuBDR to backup our main production servers and Hyper-V hosts.
  • Scheduling backups
  • Backup pruning
  • Integration with Hyper-v
  • Stability. Our VMBackup product on Windows 2012 keeps crashing the Hyper-V Management Service and then failing.
  • Upgrade process. Going from 3.5 to 3.8 was paiiinful.
  • Support process. Getting support has often required many days of support personnel being continuous connected to our production server via TeamViewer.
  • When working and stable it is "set and forget" so that reduces time to maintain.
  • Flexibility on number of backups to retain and additional full backups to make have allowed NAS storage management and avoided significant additional storage purchases.
  • When the product is unstable, as our 2012 VM backup is, it costs us time monitoring and restarting services or servers and dealing with Vembu support who have directed us to Microsoft for VSS support although the product worked fine on the platform prior to upgrade, and no additional software has been installed since.
Reasonable price for a complete solution to Share, Drive, and VM backups. Relatively simple to use once installed, if it is stable. Relatively easy restores.
Yes, we backup physical drives, network shares, and Hyper-V virtual machines with the product.
I do not believe we were aware of this file system. I'm not sure how we would benefit from its use.
  • windows backup and backupexec
Beats Windows backup hands down - but that's not hard. Beats BackupExec on ease of use.

I only know we've had issues in our usage scenario. I would recommend never upgrading the product - always remove the old and install new. The Hyper-V backup is stable on Windows 2016 but has issues on Windows 2012. We don't run it on 2012 R2.

BDRSuite Feature Ratings

Universal recovery
8
Instant recovery
7
Recovery verification
8
Business application protection
Not Rated
Multiple backup destinations
Not Rated
Incremental backup identification
7
Backup to the cloud
Not Rated
Deduplication and file compression
4
Snapshots
Not Rated
Flexible deployment
6
Management dashboard
4
Platform support
5
Retention options
7
Encryption
8

Using Vembu BDR Suite

2 - IT Director, IT Manager
2 - The same people who use it, support it. We were a small IT department when we bought Vembu.
  • Virtual Machines
  • Local Drives
  • Network Shares
  • Nothing comes to mind
  • Virtual machine cloning based on a "before recent update" need.
Stability is an issue on Windows 2012 and the upgrade process was painful

Evaluating Vembu BDR Suite and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Prior Experience with the Product
A colleague had used the product an recommended it as a cost-effective solution.
I would seek out more 3rd part reviews. A single person's experience in a dissimilar environment wasn't really enough to go on.

Vembu BDR Suite Implementation

Change management was minimal - Since we did not have an enterprise backup solution prior to implementing Vembu we did not need a lot of change control.
  • No issues, really.

Vembu BDR Suite Support

It often takes a very long time to get an issue fixed. the support folks seem committed to getting it fixed but they often seem to be trying different things and hoping something works. I did not get the sense that they had a clear idea what was wrong.
ProsCons
Good followup
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Quick Initial Response
None
No - Available support seems adequate. Not sure premium would be worth the money although I don't know what it would cost.
Yes - Several interface bugs were reported. Often the suggestion was "switch browser", "start in private browsing", or "clear cache." However, these did not fix the problem and just wasted time. Also, installing some driver component caused an immediate server reboot without warning - not cool in a production environment.
Not really. I sensed they were usually committed to finding a solution but it has often taken days.

Using Vembu BDR Suite

ProsCons
Consistent
Quick to learn
Do not like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Feel nervous using
  • Set and forget backups, and deduplication (retention) are easy to configure.
  • Determining backup failure reasons was not very easy
  • Doing an immediate backup was difficult
  • Changing backup options was challenging