BDRSuite Reviews

The primary use for this solution is to replace the old-fashioned backup solution that we had that was based at the application level. I was doing backups of an SQL database or mailboxes from Exchange, but we needed a more modern solution where we could back up the entire virtual machine.

The solution is used for taking a backup of the virtual environment, and the benefit of this is that the speed is a lot higher. The product is taking a full backup during the weekend and takes considerably less time than our old solution. During workdays, it's doing an incremental back up every three hours, and that is also a lot faster. It also gives me a lot of options on which restore point I should use, in case I need to restore something. So these are huge benefits for the organization, speed and multiple restore points, that we didn't have in the past.

Another benefit is that the whole process is running at the ESXi level so the users do not really experience any delays or any lack of performance. We just keep them going, using the infrastructure, the VMware infrastructure. In the past, that was not the case because, during the backup process, it was slowing down the server because the server itself was executing the backup. Now, another server and another hypervisor are executing the job and the end-user does not experience anything as a result of the process. It is going on in the background. No delays at all.

In terms of data protection, we are not using disaster recovery because we are not licensed for it. But given the fact that we can afford the few hours the restore is going to take us, it is reducing costs, and the maintenance we used to have of switching tapes and external drives. All that kind of stuff that we had in the past has now been eliminated.

The most valuable features for me are that I can back up the entire virtual machine, but when restoring I can restore at the file level.

One issue that we are facing is that, during the evaluation period, we had some jobs that were replicating three virtual machines from one ESXi to another. Then, during the license purchase and activation, that Replication functionality was disabled because we are not licensed for it. As a result, we have one job left, the replication job that we were running, but since we don't have access to that area of the product we now, we are unable to delete that job. I need assistance on how to unlist that job.

Otherwise, we have no issues. It's functioning as expected and we're getting the results that we were expecting from the product.

A couple of times, the Vembu server was stuck and we couldn't access the web interface of the server and we had to restart the server. But that was during the migration progress where a lot of the equipment was updated and changing, so we cannot blame the product itself. Since the environment stabilized, we haven't faced any issues at all with the product.

We haven't encountered any issues with scalability. We gave it fewer resources than the server needs. Initially, we configured it with 16 gigs and then we cut it in half, giving it just 8 gigs, and the system is still performing and acting stably and within our needs and expectations.

Our building hosts around six companies. Currently, the product is used only for one hypervisor and one of the companies but the plan is to expand: First, the licensing for more hypervisors, and second, to expand the enterprise solution because we might need to use the Replication function that we are not using at the moment.

Their technical support is excellent. The speed at which those guys are replying is like chatting through email. They reply immediately and, in most of the cases, they have the answer available right away. It is very acceptable and we appreciate that.

We were using Symantec Veritas Backup but it was an old-fashioned solution - at least the version that we were using. It was doing backups on the level of application, taking a backup of a database or directory structure or the like. We switched to Vembu because it allows us to back up the entire virtual infrastructure and then we minimize the downtime in case of an emergency or a failure.

The initial setup was straightforward because it was an appliance. We downloaded an already-installed and already-working virtual machine which is acting as a backup server. There were minor issues to connect it to our local network and set up some iSCSI drives and volumes, etc., but it was next to nothing when compared with having to install it from scratch.

We downloaded the virtual appliance, activated it, and then configured the network interfaces. After that, we connected the server to our hypervisors and the system was up and running. The deployment took four hours.

We didn't use a third-party service provider at all. We directly contacted Vembu, and the back-office and support personnel were very helpful. Every issue was solved within hours.

In terms of money saved, it's hard to say because we need to calculate the man-hours that we spent on monitoring the old system, and the employees that had to visit the computer room and replace or change tapes, etc. So it's not that clear. But the fact that we were using an old solution for about 12 or 13 years, I expect the amount of money we will save is going to be huge.

We have only been using the product for two months in production now, so the return on investment is not easy to see in that short period. But I believe that it's not going to take more than the next six months to see a return on investment, considering the man-hours that we are saving, that we aren't spending any more monitoring an old backup system.

Pricing is fair enough.

What was not clear enough in the documentation on the website was that that you're licensing per CPU socket and you are only licensing on the restore sockets, not the backup sockets. It's a bit technical, but it was very well explained during the demonstration that we had during the evaluation period. The technician explained exactly how the licensing is working. That was information that I couldn't find on their site and it needed to be explained by their representative.

We had in mind to use another solution that was not based on Snapshots. It was based on replicating on the sub-second level of the VM virtual disks. Although it was compelling, and we considered that solution, it didn't have that direct access to information that the Vembu side was giving us.

To get a quotation on that product you needed to find a representative near you and have them do a quotation for you. It was not that direct and immediate. On the other hand, Vembu had all the pricing and documentation listed on their site, so we had all the information we needed. It was within the budget and we decided to test it. That's why we chose Vembu as our solution.

Although Vembu doesn't seem to be very fast for some environments, for example, banking, because it's based on Snapshots, which is a rather slower procedure, it has been just fine. But I would evaluate another solution that is not based on Snapshots. I can for sure recommend Vembu if high-availability is not a requirement.

We are using the compression that is embedded in the system. We downloaded the Linux virtual appliance, Linux Ubuntu, and this appliance is now part of our live organization, it's a live system. The embedded compression system is very satisfactory and we didn't have to alter anything within it. 

We didn't need to activate encryption because our infrastructure is only available within our local network, it's not available outside the firewall, and the destination drive is actually an iSCSI volume that is only accessible through the Vembu backup server. That's why we didn't need to encrypt our backups and possibly add delays to the whole procedure.

We don't use Microsoft Hyper-V, we only use VMware ESXi. The virtual environment that we're backing up through the Vembu solution is one ESXi that hosts three virtual machines. It's an end-to-end VMware solution. During the evaluation period, we also had the option to use the Replication function. We tested it and it's an option for the company to purchase, to upgrade the license to activate it, but this is going to be decided in the future.

The number of end-users using the functionality of the backup solution is around 70, but the end-users don't know it is being used. There are just two system administrators who use the Vembu console as administrators. One is full-time and the other one is part-time, so we need one-and-a-half people to run it. The maintenance is so minor. We just follow up on the emails the server sends saying that we successfully finished a job or that there was an issue. We then visit the web interface look at the reason for that failure - because the server was busy or the like. The maintenance is very easy.

I rate it at eight out of ten because, during the evaluation period, we had a server that was sizing at about 1.8 TB and the product took about 26 to 27 hours to restore it. So the slow restore is an issue. Eventually, we minimized the amount of data. Now, we are less than a terabyte, around 800 gig, so we expect the restore to take less time. But it's the slow restore that makes me give it an eight.

We manage 100s of backups at any given time. This includes virtual machines, both VMware and Hyper-V, physical machines running Windows, and file-level backups.

We have backups that are 100% cloud-based as well as ones that retain both a local backup and a cloud backup copy. The data replicated to the cloud must be contained within a data center that is owned/managed by our organization.

Our recovery processes primarily include being able to restore directly to an ESXi host/vCenter appliance. This must be able to be completed in the shortest amount of time possible.

The Vembu BDR product is very intuitive and easy to use. This provided us easy training of our staff, a quick process for our internal documentation, and reduced time in installation/configuration and deployment to new customers/devices.

The high level of stability of the Vembu BDR Suite has reduced our engineering management time by at least 35%, which has also lead to a higher rate of successful backups.

The retention mechanisms within the solution are a critical component of our backup strategy. It has allowed us to reduce the amount of backup storage we use by more than 25%, which has saved on our hardware costs both initially and on an ongoing basis.

The most valuable feature is the highest level of flexibility. The Vembu BDR platform allows you to backup virtual machines and physical machines at both the file level and image level. You can choose to deploy offsite backups only, onsite backups only, or both onsite with replication offsite.

Being able to use one platform to accommodate all of these different scenarios has allowed us to train our staff on one solution and really make sure they are experts at that product. 

The ability to restore backups directly to any ESXi Host/vCenter environment is critical for us. The process in which to execute the restore is simple and the recovery time is quick. We regularly execute restores of 5TB-10TB environments in a matter of hours.

With any backup that uses VMware snapshots, there is a disk ballooning issue where VMware reports that the server is using 100% of the assigned storage, even when the disk is thin provisioned, when the Windows "Optimizer" runs while the snapshot is in place. Basically, this is the case when the backup is running. This issue is not specific to the Vembu BDR solution; however, it would be nice if Vembu was able to implement some function that would disable/disallow the Windows Optimizer from running during a backup.

We have been using Vembu BDR Suite for more than 10 years.

As an MSP, we have used many different backup solutions, as both a managed service as well as customer-deployed. The Vembu BDR solution is one of the most stable platforms we have used. For us, some of the measurements we use to determine stability are:

1. The installation/configuration is streamlined and functions as expected.
2. General use of the product runs smoothly without any regular "glitches", services stopping, or having to constantly reboot the machine to resolve issues.
3. Backups have a high completion percentage. More importantly, not getting failed backups on reoccurring issues that you have already implemented a fix for.

It currently supports all of the features that we need in a backup solution. However, I am aware that as O365 implementations continue to grow, I suspect additional O365 backup functionality will be needed. Vembu BDR currently supports backups of O365, although it does not currently have an email archiving function to the O365 backups. This is something that we have had customers request.

As with any technology based product, there are times when assistance is needed to configure, update, or troubleshoot the product. It is critical for our organization to be able to obtain support 24x7 with a team that understands their product. This is one of the areas we are most impressed with Vembu Technologies. They are always very quick to respond, provide excellent tools to their team, and are always efficient at driving the ticket to resolution.

We had a few concerns with our previous backup solution that we were looking to remediate.

1. The synthetic full was a forever backup, which over time would take up a ridiculous amount of space. With the Vembu BDR solution, we are able to configure a retention process of however many days we specify. This greatly reduces the amount of backup space used and ultimately saves us in hardware costs.
2. The time needed to maintain the backups was a problem. Our volume of failed backups on Vembu BDR is at least 50% less than our previous backup platform. This not only reduces our engineering costs but also increases the morale of our engineering team, as they are less stressed about failing backups.
3. Backup chains on our old backup platform had to be manually validated and cleaned up. I felt the risk of missing a file during this process was too high and could result in the inability to restore data. With Vembu BDR, the retention process is entirely automated within the software and requires no manual cleanup.

Compared to other backup solutions, the initial setup was the most straightforward.

We deployed in-house.

I would guess our tangible ROI was 12-24 months. However, for us, it was more valuable to deploy a solution that provides us confidence in being able to restore, as well as reduce the stress of our engineering team. These are invaluable items that you can't really put an ROI on.

If backup and recovery performance is critical for your environment, then the hardware is just as important as the software. We deploy full servers as our backup appliances with only SSD disks and enough processing power and memory to support the backups and the restored servers if onsite recovery is a component of the solution.

Any organization that is looking to deploy a backup solution in their environment with minimal time commitment and the highest level of confidence in being able to restore their data should be seriously considering one of the Vembu Technologies backup solutions.

In summary, the Vembu BDR solution currently fulfills all of the functions that we need it to at this time.

Backup and replication.

If we have any issues with servers having been corrupted or damaged, we are able to restore our backups. We are also able to store our backups offsite, in case of fire. Right now I'm using it with VMware. The benefit is being able to replicate the information to a different offsite building where I can store it. We're an FQHC and we have to have an offsite backup in case of a fire.

If we were to lose all of our data we wouldn't be able to operate. We run a 24-hour clinic, we have an ER department, and the data needs to be safe. If we didn't have that information stored safely, our patient information, we would not be able to run the business. So it's very valuable for us.

It also saves us time being able to do backups automatically instead of manually.

Finally, for reporting purposes, it's safer for us to have multiple places where backups are stored. We feel safe that the information is backed up more than once.

The most important feature is the Restore, to be able to restore in a disaster recovery situation.

If the English accent of the support agents was a little better, so that we, as the users, could understand it better, that would be nice. It's very hard to understand the support people when we talk to them because of the accent.

We haven't encountered any issues with the stability so far. It's been working fine.

It can handle a lot because it's doing a whole data center, so it's handling everything.

Tech support is good.

I purchased Veeam but my local reseller sold me only a minimal number of licenses and I was not told that I needed to purchase many licenses. So it was not cost-effective for us to have that solution installed here.

The initial setup was not complex at all. It was easy.

It's very hard to estimate ROI. If I have a disaster issue here, my whole company is down, so I cannot put a value on it. It's really the value of the whole company. If we don't have that data we aren't able to run. It's a very valuable tool for us.

The pricing is good. 

Veeam was one of the options we looked at.

Test it first. Make sure it works in your environment. But I will also say that it's an immediate investment that needs to be done.

We aren't using the compression or encryption features. We don't need them.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It's not a ten because the accent of the customer support agents is very difficult to understand. You have to ask a few times when speaking to them. That's the only issue, the rest of it is good. It's a good product. It's working.

We back up all our customers' files. We back up only files, and maybe some databases. However, primarily, we are backing up files on our own server.

We are currently using the updated version of this product.

We can create a backup contract with our customers and software using this solution. We can backup the software here in Austria, because we have new rules here in Europe, since last year, which are very strict for data protection. 

The network solution is the most important feature, because we have our own backup server and are doing file backups for our customers.

The compression, encryption and deduplication features are important. If we can save space, it's okay. The encryption is also very important, because it is in our contracts. It is a must. We have to use it for our customers.

We have not been able to move our backups from one drive to another one. We can only create a storage pool. However, if we want to change a drive, it is not possible to delete one drive as long there is data on it. For this, we have to call the support. While they can solve this, it is not out-of-the-box.

If there is a failure, the logging for the backups could be better.

Sometimes, I miss some features from the old solution. 

The stability is very good, but it is not perfect. Sometimes, we have to restart the server, because of updates. I have to sometimes manually restart the services. When it is running, it's perfect and nice. 

When we have to restart the server, then we have some troubles with the services from Vembu. We have to manually restart the services, and afterwards, it's okay.

The software solution is okay. While it has some bugs, it has been okay in most cases. 

It takes me two to five hours to do maintenance per week.

We have small customers. For them, high availability is not a priority, only file backup is important. They are very small. They have around five employees. Also, because our customers are not asking for this, we do not offer high availability. We do not have the resources for it, and our servers are probably not big enough for this type of solution. We only offer the simple file backup.

Our biggest customer has about 20 employees. However, they have a huge amount of data.

We have three users in our company, but we represent about 30 companies. All three employees in our company are systems engineers. We do the backups, deployments, and maintenance.

At the moment, we do not accept new customers because we do not want to grow. We are happy with what we have. We have a lot to do. We have had good customers for a lot of years, and that's perfect.

They have very good support. I always get an answer quite fast when we have trouble. When we write an email, on next day, we will have an answer. This is really good and unusual. I like the support.

Previously, we had only local backup solutions at our customers on tapes. We had trouble all the time with tapes. This was more than 10 years ago. Then, we switched to drives to create the backups at our customers' sites, but all the time these drives were defect. So, we implemented a big server in our company, where we only have to do maintenance on one big device, not on all the small devices at our customers. We searched for a solution, and Vembu was our first choice.

The current version of Vembu is much better now than the previous version. The newer version is nice. It may not have as many features as the older solution, but it is faster and better to administrate. It is a good solution.

The initial setup is easy and very nice. 

The deployment was not a big project. The backup service was running in a few hours. Then, we have only to implement clients at our customers. 

The process is quite fast. We set up a back up server, then alert the clients. We use a Windows Server with a lot of storage capacity. There is no need for an implementation strategy.

We had an old solution with the old clients. We moved them step-by-step as individual customers to the new solution over half a year. 

Only from within the organization was it a little tricky, because we had to implement new contracts for our customers. It was technically a little different with the old solution. We did need a new server. Also, we had to move all our customers to the new solution step-by-step.

The return of investment was very fast, within half a year. 

The best thing about the product is the license management. It is a true managed service provider solution. It has a good price. The licensing is quite flexible, which is one of the most important things for us. 

The high availability is too expensive for our customers.

I did a lot of evaluations before choosing a product. We tested about 20 different products. Vembu was the best. Some of the other solutions were also very good, but were extraordinarily priced (too expensive). Others, I didn't like the licensing, software, or were only cloud solutions. 

Vembu has the flexibility with its licenses and is a real managed service provider solution. My feeling is that Vembu understands what a service provider needs, not only local administrators. It is one of the reasons that why we chose Vembu.

We haven't found another solution for its price with all this features.

I would recommend the product. I already recommend it to our partners. It is a really good solution. I like the product. It has good support. For small companies, it's the perfect solution.

We do not use virtual environments. We have done this in the past, but we do not implement virtual clients anymore since we have only small customers and virtual appliances are now on cloud spaces. So, we do not have virtual servers at our customers.

We have used Hyper-V, but it was not beneficial.

We're doing onsite local backups as well as offsite DR of our VM infrastructure.

Realistically, it is no different than the previous backup solution we were using, other than it costs less. As far as workflow is concerned, it hasn't really changed.

We use it to back up our VM infrastructure, but as far as benefiting the organization, it's just a guarantee that, if we go down, I can spool it back up at either location. That's the biggest benefit to this sort of backup solution, instead of files on another drive.

This is a part of our enterprise backup solution. It has saved us a considerable amount of money.

The agentless backups are the big selling point on this, as well as being able to send out across sites so that I can do a restore at either of our two locations.

The compression is good. As far as the encryption is concerned, I'm glad that it's there for site to site. We don't necessarily need it just because of the way that we're connected, so it's not really a selling feature, one way or the other.

The only place where I would really want to see improvement, out the gate, is more granular scheduling. With the previous solution that we were using, you could pick different times based on different days. Right now, with Vembu, I just have every X number of hours on these days, but if I want to do an offset or to only do two backups on Friday and Saturday - versus whole hourly incrementals during the week - I don't have that granularity. That would be something that I would be looking for.

With the exception of when we required that initial hotfix, it has been extremely stable.

Scalability is part of the reason why we got it. The opportunity to push the offsite data recovery to multiple sites, instead of just, one was a big selling feature for us. Currently, we are a two-location organization, but we want the opportunity to be able to scale up and pop another one of these units down to another location and have them replicate freely between.

The tech support is phenomenal. We were not expecting a fix to happen as quickly as it did. The response time, through everything I've experienced so far with them, has been within an hour.

We did use a different solution previous to this. It was an onsite and cloud-based solution. With the cloud-based component, we switched because of the cost savings with Vembu, because we have two sites that we can leverage. The two sites are for disaster recovery, which is far cheaper than doing a cloud-based backup.

We had a few issues with the initial setup that were solved by support. The actual installation of the software was simple enough. However, there was a bug. We required a hotfix to get two of our larger backups going. But that was remedied within a few days by their engineering team and it has been working flawlessly since. With the exception of just waiting for that to go, it was fairly painless.

The deployment took roughly a week. But we were also figuring out a bunch of different backend stuff as well, so it wasn't a week on the software package in particular. It's a part of a larger backup solution. To get the entire thing up and going was about a week.

In terms of implementation strategy, we did build-outs on separate servers so that we would have dedicated servers that would be doing the backups, instead of having the BDR suite reside on our VM infrastructure. The reasons for that strategy were

1. to limit overhead on our current infrastructure and 
2. if any of our hosts went down, our backup would not be part and parcel of our host network. 

It was completely segregated, just to keep the business continuity intact as much as possible.

We were in trial for about a month, and the actual deployment has been in place for about a month.

We did it all in-house.

Our return in investment for this solution, including all the additional hardware that we chose to purchase for it, including hard drives and the server host that it runs on, as well the subscription, means it will be about a six- to seven-month return on investment for us.

The subscription model that we're signed up for is very good. The only thing that is something of a sticking point is the fact that you can't do PO-based licensing. It's all just credit card. That required a little bit of a sell for management because typically everything we do is PO-based and our previous solution was PO-based. That would be the only thing about the subscription service that we didn't really enjoy.

We were really only looking at Vembu. It was brought to our attention by a reseller we had used for another product, as the backup solution that they typically push for clients. We thought we would take a look at it and, after we ran our trials, we found that it would work for us.

Have a separate backup appliance, if you can, a separate, physical backup appliance so that if your host goes, your backup doesn't go down with it at the same time.

As far as the encryption is concerned, I'm glad that it's there for site to site. We don't necessarily need it just because of the way that we're connected, so it's not really a selling feature, one way or the other.

We don't use Hyper-V. Our Vembu is working with EXSi. I have not had to do a full server restore, yet. But I have had to do restores of incremental points in time, for certain files. We have tested the restore feature of the entire guest VM. If I have a server go down, I have a lot of people who can't do work. So a fast restore is critical.

It's just our core IT team that is actually using the solution. There are three people who have direct access to it, but we serve a larger number of users in our organization. However, they don't see anything as far as backend or backups are concerned. As far as they know, nothing's changed, nothing's different, it has no effect or impact on their day-to-day operations.

For deployment and maintenance, now that it's set up, there's not much to do on it, aside from doing checks every so often to ensure that the backups are still happening.

There is a potential use case to increase usage, such as doing some critical workstation backups with it. However, we are not doing that at this time.

I give the solution an eight out of ten. Everything has some room for improvement. The more granular backup scheduling is one of them. There was a slight hiccup that we weren't really expecting, when we were first looking into this, where you can't do a restore while a backup is in process. That was a bit of an annoyance at first, but once we got an explanation from their technical team as to why it's designed and built out like that, it made more sense. It's just one thing that I realize they can't fix but it would be a nice to have.

We use it primarily for backups and restoration of data, for disaster recovery purposes. We back up our file servers as well as our access control servers. We use it for standard, physical Windows 2016 servers, at this stage.

The key things we use in this solution thus far are only the backup portion, the recovery, and the reports. We will try to make use of it more extensively, but for now it's working for us.

It's on-prem at this stage, but we would love at a later stage to go to the cloud.

• The dashboard is very nice. 
• The solution is very user-friendly. 

When you're looking at your dashboard, you can see all your active jobs. You can see exactly if they're successful or failed and you can actually drill down and see what caused the problem. The fact you can see that right away is nice. 

It's a very simple layout, but effective. What you see is what you get. Some dashboards have these funny graphs and a lot of information. But what I want to know is, number-one, what jobs are running? What type of jobs are running? And I want to know what the job status is. If it's a red "X" I know I have to investigate. If it's a green checkmark then I know I don't have to stress about it, it has actually backed up what I've selected. It's simple. That's what you want.

What I would love to see on the dashboard are graphs, per backup  job. I want to see the month and the days in it. It doesn't matter what type of graph, but it must just give you more information. Currently it's in text format and you have to click on it and investigate. It would be nice if I could see information in a small chart as well. If a job has failed, when did it actually fail and what percentage of it failed? Did it fail completely, 75 percent or 100 percent or did it only fail partially?

Then we would know we have to look at settings, or maybe there's a permission issue, or maybe the unit was offline. Currently it's just showing a red "X" and you have to go in to have a look. If it gave you some information such as "100 percent complete, successful," and not just a checkmark, and if it failed it would tell you, "75 percent successful," then you would know more.

We've only been using the product for three months, and only on three servers.

It's very stable, unless you have somebody messing around. Otherwise, it should not have any issues.

It's scalable. It's similar to industry standard backup and disaster recovery solutions, like Veeam. 

We want to move to the cloud at a later stage, and we also want to do backups of Office 365. We're in the process of moving from webmail to Office 365. Once we're there, we're going to use the same platform to make backups of critical user data and mailboxes.

Although Office 365 has retention and backup solutions in place, we prefer to use Vembu in addition, on top of that, for our high-level users, to be 100 percent sure. Microsoft can maybe give you 30 or 60 days of retention, but if you have your own backups, you can go back to one year, based on the typical needs of users.

Once we have our Office 365 portion up and running and maybe one or two email users, I would love to perform a backup online. The challenge we have is that our upload is a bit slow. We might need to use a satellite link, but within the next month or two we should have a solution and the internet should not be a problem. Then we can most probably run some of these backups from the cloud version. The idea is to ultimately move to the cloud.

Currently, the information we back up is for about 60 to 80 active users, across all the employees in the company.

The salespeople I've dealt with are fantastic; they are great people. They wanted the solution to work and they only stopped phoning me the moment I told them, "Listen, I'm alright. I'm okay now." They wanted to make sure that the application was working and meeting our needs. That was very nice.

And obviously, you can contact them anytime and they will help you. Their technical support is great. It's top-notch. The turnaround time is quick. The last time I contacted the person I have always dealt with, within a couple of hours he contacted me. It's not like it's 24 hours or 48 hours, it's less than that. It is good.

It's a very nice, easy, and economical solution. I'm coming from a Veeam background, but Veeam is a bit expensive. That's why we opted for Vembu. I tested out the Vembu trial version and found that it has a lovely interface, it's easy to work with, and it's something I can teach quickly. With Veeam, you must attend courses to understand it; you can't just show somebody. If I'm on leave, or I'm leaving the company, I can give anybody in my position a quick rundown.

The company I'm supporting now is not a corporate company or a listed company. The company I used to work for was a listed company and they were forced by the auditors to use a certain type of backup solution but it was expensive. When I started with this smaller company, they didn't have any backups. If something happened they would lose all their information. I was browsing the web looking for an economical but effective solution to meet the needs of this organization. I was surprised, as I had never heard about Vembu. But I checked them out and that's where the journey started with Vembu.

It's cost-effective for us.

The initial setup is straightforward. And what was nice was that I had somebody on the line to talk me through it, just to make sure. You're allowed to play around with it to get more familiar with it. Coming from a Veeam background I tried not to compare it with that. I had to work with it to make 100 percent sure that I appreciated Vembu.

I figured out most of the things by myself because it's straightforward. It's very easy if you have some form of IT or backup background. It should not be a challenge or an issue. Maybe if you're brand new to computers it could be a challenge but if you have some experience with running backups it's easy to work with.

The deployment was done within two days because we don't have a big setup. It was just me involved in the setup, from our side, and for maintenance I have an IT assistant. If I'm not there, he can handle it as well.

My experience working with the Vembu person during the setup was good. They are very proud of the product. They want it to work.

It's still too early for us to see ROI. 

But the annual cost is so low that it's going to be difficult to calculate a return on investment. But if we are going to do backups of Office 365 and those types of things, the business might see ROI, because then you're working with a lot of user information as well, and they can see the reports.

It's more affordable than Veeam, so smaller companies can afford to have a solution like this in place, which is very nice.

For three licenses we pay not even 3,000 Rand per annum, which is a bargain with what you're getting. It's not expensive if you compare it with the counterpart.

I didn't evaluate any other options other than testing Veeam for a month. I know that product and it's fantastic, but when it came to going from trial version to live version, it was a bit expensive. I went for Vembu because I could pay a third of the price and get the same service.

When I look at a product like this there are a couple of basic things it must do: 

• I must be able to access it easily, deploy it easily
• It must be secure. 
• If I want to make changes, updates must be easy as well. 
• It must be integratable, compatible with different operating systems. 

Vembu ticked all the boxes.

Do you know when a business starts to appreciate a backup solution? When it loses information and needs to recover it. If your senior management is not very risk-minded or they tend to see these things as a waste of money, the moment they lose information and you can restore it within no time, they start to respect the product and they are more than willing, when you go to them for upgrades or improvements, to actually pay for them because they know you're adding value to the business. It's not just an expense.

For a small company like ours, I would rate Vembu at eight out of 10, because while the dashboard is very nice, there are some things that the major backup solutions provide as a stock-standard, like the graphing information. Most backup solutions offer it standard. I also give it eight out of 10 because I want them to improve, but it would be nice to move closer to 10. It may take them a while to get there, but with Vembu I can sleep. I don't have to worry and that's good.

We have a multi-tenant environment with multi-cloud, but we are only using this for our local data center backups. This is a small setup with around 50 to 60 VMs.

We are able to back up our local virtual machines. Without backup we could end up in very critical situations.

It backs up our virtual machines with the CBT, Changed Block Tracking. This is a common feature. We don't have a complex hierarchy here because we have a local data center with minimal use. 

The compression ratio is fine and the deduplication is as well. We are not using the encryption feature yet, as we only deployed it recently. We may use it later on.

The reports are at a basic level and there is room for improvement there. It only has historical reports and VM backup job-level reports.

I have been using BDR Suite for about three or four months.

The stability is okay, it's running fine. Up to now we haven't had any negative issues.

Technical support is good. Whenever I raise a ticket they reply in a timely fashion.

Our basic goal is the backup of our infrastructure. We chose this platform because it's cost-effective.

The initial setup is very straightforward. The solution is very easy. It's not a complex one where we need to follow detailed diagrams. I installed and tested everything and it's running fine now.

Initially, I had some issues but I fixed them myself. When I deployed this tool it was having issues with some virtual machines, specifically with Windows 2019. Fortunately, I was able to fix that issue by updating the Windows version to the latest software.

The whole setup took one or two days, including the installation and configuration of servers. 

Fixing the issue I mentioned took some days because I need to update the servers. Otherwise, the overall deployment did not take a long time.

In terms of a deployment plan, before deployment I considered my whole environment and then I started the deployment. Our IT team is just three or four people and I did it myself.

I didn't need too much help for Vembu, other than for licensing. They helped me on the licensing purchase.

The pricing is very good compared to Veeam. Veeam is very well-known software for backup and replication, and comparing Vembu to that, from the financial aspect, Vembu is very good.

I deployed Veeam and it worked very well, but the problem was that its price was very high. As a result, I searched for another solution and found Vembu. I deployed it and we have been happy with it. For us, the major difference was the pricing.

Our environment is at a very basic level. We don't have multi-level vCenters or cloud. Vembu BDR Suite is working fine for us. Right now we have only three hosts with virtual machines and it's okay for us. 

Overall, this suite is very good. It has features which we use like a backup proxy and test processing. It delivers an enterprise-level data protection solution and helps us reduce our budget. It's cost-effective.

We do cloud hosting for our customers, and we do reselling when they want to do VMware on their premises.

The backup of VMware ESX is the most important to us. That's what we use. We use it to back up all of our private cloud, and it's backed up hourly.

We sent a letter complaining about how the lack of customer service has caused us problems. We're actually dumping Vembu and we're going with Veeam, and we're asking for our money back. The thing that needs to be improved most is their customer support. The product itself is fine, but the customer support is basically nonexistent.

Instead of helping us meet new challenges it has actually caused us problems. We wanted a backup solution so that we could quickly back up and recover all of our customer virtual machines. In case something happened to the hardware, we could quickly recover it on different hardware. We looked at different solutions such as Veeam and Vembu. Vembu was recommended to us and we found it to be cheaper than Veeam but, unfortunately, because they're based in India, not in North America, the customer service doesn't even provide phone support.

We had a lot of problems getting it configured in the first place. They also wanted us to allow them remote access to our machines without us watching what they're doing, which is a huge security risk for us. We said we couldn't do that, and they said they don't offer any phone support whatsoever.

The product itself actually works mostly well. One of the features of the product is Application-Aware and that does not work properly. When we tested it with the Veeam product, it did work properly. We tried to get it to work, to get support to help get it working. It went back and forth for about two weeks through email, trying to get help to get this feature working, and it just did not work.

With the Application-Aware setting, the stability was near zero on a scale of one to ten.

As far as scalability goes, everything seemed okay. I would rate it around a seven out of ten.

I would rate technical support at one out of ten. I don't even know why they have a tech support phone number because I was told in an email from a manager that they don't provide tech support over the phone. Every time I call the tech support phone number, I'm told I have to send an email to support@vembu.com. I said that I would pay extra for premium support but they said they don't even offer it.

The initial setup was complicated because of the Application-Aware feature not working.

For someone who doesn't want the Application-Aware feature to work, everything else is up to par. The licensing is straightforward. They license it per CPU. 

One thing to note is that when you configure which virtual machine you're going to back up, if it's on one physical machine, they license it there. If it automatically fails over to a second machine, the license doesn't automatically move over with it. If they could make that a little more streamlined, that would be an improvement.

We did test Veeam. Vembu vs Veeam came in as a lot less expensive, but I guess you get what you pay for. That’s why we have already sent an email to Vembu saying we want our money back.

We looked at a few other products, but we didn't try them all out.

We've already gone ahead and purchased Veeam, and already tested the Veeam phone support while just on a trial. Someone picks up the phone right away and helps you resolve it. They do remote access, but they let you be on the call when they're doing remote access. They never access your machines without your permission, etc., whereas Vembu was the opposite.

My advice would be not to go with Vembu if you're in North America because it's too hard to get ahold of anybody in India.

We were a reseller, but we've canceled that. We've told all our customers that we're not reselling Vembu because of the problems with the tech support and the problems with the Application-Aware feature not working.

I would rate Vembu at three out of ten because for simple configurations it works fine, but overall, their tech support is very poor. Conversations with tech support and the way they handle tech support are very poor. One example is that I was told that they want to access our servers, but that I wouldn't be allowed to be on the phone and watch what they're doing. I can't be sure that they're only accessing what they're supposed to be doing. The other thing is, they don't offer any extended or premium support. Vembu is for a low-end, small company which doesn't want to do much.