BDRSuite Reviews

Our whole environment is virtualized except for a couple of servers which are still physical. So I primarily use this for backing up my physical servers. I do an image backup as well as a file-level backup.

The main improvement is the compression, the space. I back up one particular server with close to 1.2 TB, and the way the software compresses it is close to 600 or 700 TB. Vembu compresses it to close to 450 gigabytes, that's gigabytes. So that’s really amazing, the way in which the backup compression happens. It creates a lot of space in my storage. I’m saving almost 50 percent of my file storage space, SAN. that’s one of the key features of this.

One thing I’m very much impressed by is the compression ratio. The rate at which it compresses the data during backup is really very good. In fact, I’d say it’s better than Symantec Backup Exec. I have Backup Exec, in my environment, and I have Veeam. Symantec is now Veritas, so I have played with all the backups, but the way in which this handles the compression is really one of the key features.

It’s also very, very stable. I haven’t made any changes to it. I just installed and it’s working. I restored a couple of times, and everything seems to be fine.

I do have one suggestion for them. The process is a bit cumbersome when you remove an agent, delete that job, and add the agent to the same server. Even though the agent is already installed in that server, the system does not recognize it. We have to uninstall the current agent, restart the server, install the push agent - a new agent - and then restart the server. I think they should try to avoid that. Symantec doesn’t work that way. You push the agent once, the agent stays in the server for good.

It’s very stable. I don't have any issues because it’s automated. The moment a backup is completed we all get an email. First thing in the morning, we check those emails and it’s on top of it.

I’m not going to scale with this because I’m primarily using it for physical servers.

Maybe my next project will be, when my Veeam support runs out, to try using Vembu - because Veeam is very expensive - for backing up my virtual servers and let's see how things are going to work.

Support is very good. When you call them or send out a support email, immediately someone responds. It’s really good. They come back with an answer immediately. There has never been a time where they said they wanted to do some research on it. The moment I send them an issue, the guys fix it immediately.

Before Vembu I was using Symantec (which is now Veritas). The main reason I switched is the price point, the cost. Vembu cost me one-third of what Veritas was charging me for backing up the three servers.

The setup is straightforward. The only problem is, if I delete the server from my backup list and I want to add the server back, that is complex.

It is very cost efficient, effective. I’d say it's one-third the cost of Veritas when compared to the server backups. I even tried image backups on Acronis, but Acronis is very expensive. So these are some of the key reasons why I opted for it.

Licensing is straightforward, it’s simple, they should keep it the way they have right now.

There is no need for any advice. A person who has infrastructure and backup experience should be able to do it. It doesn’t require any special knowledge for the configuration part or reinstalling.

I rate it at eight out of 10 because of the complexity involved in reinstalling that agent.

Buy, install it, use it, back it up, that’s it. It works fine.

We were looking for a backup for Red Hat Virtualization. We don't need any advanced features from a backup solution yet. We don't have VMware or Hyper-V, we only have Red Hat Virtualization.

We are a service provider and we have many customers but we are only using this solution for one of our customers. They have a small environment with four servers.

It was very difficult to find a product that supports Red Hat Virtualization natively and to take a snapshot of the VM or a full backup or a dump from the machine. The option that Vembu proposed, to take the machine as an image, take it from the system, is also good. It has enhanced our backup system. Before, it was very difficult and we did it manually. Now, it's easy to take an image from Red Hat.

BDR Suite helps us deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce our budgets. It is about half of the cost of other products we looked at.

• It's easy to install.
• It's simple to configure.

They said they can support Red Hat Virtualization and we assumed that they support any compatible system but we found we need to do a network backup or a network image, which is not what it said on their website. I have had many discussions with them about where this component is. Initially, I was searching for a component which would back up Red Hat Virtualization. They said they support this in the same way they support Hyper-V and VMware. I haven't found the feature in their portal or in any of their software. They haven't made a special agent for it, in the way they did for Hyper-V.

When we were in negotiations and discussing this with their pre-sales, we said we haven't found any documents from them talking about how they support Red Hat Virtualization. At the end of the day they said, "No, we deal with Red Hat Virtualization in the same way that we take an image of a file through the network." It's not native in the solution itself. For VMware they have a special agent. But for Red Hat, it's just a network backup, the same as files. When I asked about a license to support Red Hat, they said you just take the network backup and it will do the same job.

For the moment, that is fine for us. We will take the image. But it is not what we expected from the product.

We started with it just before the [COVID-19] lockdown in April, but we haven't worked much with it yet.

We have yet to test the stability of the solution.

We have also not yet tested the scalability.

In the future we may increase usage if we find it's good for backup. We plan to take the DR solution from them.

We haven't had to contact technical support yet.

We have used many solutions in the past. We switched to Vembu because of the Red Hat Virtualization. Our old solutions don't support it.

The initial setup was straightforward. There were no difficulties and no advanced settings that you need to learn before you do the setup. We had it deployed within minutes.

We have an enterprise license. We found it very simple and straightforward. For our needs, the price of the backup system is not too much.

However, the prices are not clear in the portal. Not all the items are listed.

We checked out Veeam and Acronis but both were very expensive compared to Vembu.

I can recommend Vembu for those who need just file backup.

It's a straightforward solution. It was easy to install and deploy for many machines, taking backups from files and servers in the same way. They offer 10 GB for cloud that you can use for free.

We haven't tested its compression, encryption, or deduplication features yet. So far, just our system admin is using and maintaining the solution.

We back up servers and workstations.

One of the things that Vembu does for us is, of course, create high-availability for backups, which, if we came to a worst-case scenario, is one of the reasons we selected it, with the high incidence of ransomware. Should we be hit with ransomware, optimally it would allow us to be back up and running pretty quickly.

The solution helps us deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce budgets. It's difficult to estimate how much we have saved, although I know we have saved. We did do a cost analysis up-front and we saved money compared to our prior solution.

The most valuable feature is the ability, from a console, to manage the different computers to be backed up.

In addition, I use the encryption regularly, and the deduplication as well, but not extensively. The deduplication is very handy. It reduces the size of the backups, which we can then upload to an online storage platform. That's one of the reasons I selected it.

We've been using Vembu for about nine months.

I have had issues where it was working and then it stopped and I had to diagnose what had changed or gone wrong to get it back up. While it is generally stable, I've had issues with stability. The last time we had this issue was about six weeks ago.

It's very scalable. As we add workstations, as we grow, we'll generally use the solution on those new workstations.

Customer service could be improved. There seems to be a delay when trying to get to someone for customer service issues. Usually they'll tell me to send an email. That is one area that I would like to see improved.

I had pretty good technical support while we were evaluating the product. Since then, it has not been so good.

We had a solution before Vembu. We switched because of the cost factor and the deduplication.

It was not particularly straightforward. I had to contact customer service in order to complete the initial set up. The deployment took us the better part of a day to complete everything, because we had to reach out to customer service.

We started out by testing it on a workstation and, once we were satisfied that it met our needs, we deployed it to the servers and to the other workstations.

We did it in-house.

The pricing is pretty reasonable.

We looked at Macrium Reflect. That was another solution that we used.

It's a robust solution. Evaluate it first in the environment and ensure that it actually satisfies your needs. It's a fairly cost-effective solution. For us, it has assisted in developing a robust backup strategy of keeping a backup in-house. We back up to a NAS in-house, and then we try to do an online backup off the in-house backup, so that we always have a remote copy of our backup. So it's been a pretty robust solution.

We have about 25 workstations that we're backing up. There are two of us, my IT person and me, who handle the deployment and management of the backup solution.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten because customer service could be improved. I don't have a specific problem with the product. In our experience, the initial implementation could be easier. The product itself, once implemented, gets the job done. If it was divided up, I would give the working product a ten. But the initial implementation, from our experience, because we needed to have customer service log in to our system and walk us through, I would give a seven. And I would give customer service a seven.

The primary use case is for backup.

I am using the latest version.

What we like best about the system is the use of its operation and the backups versus what we had to do earlier. We use it to back up our virtual environments, mainly VMware.

Everything is happening in the background without running any commands. It runs seamlessly in the back, so this is a great achievement. This is also a great convenience for this organization. Previously, somebody had to do it manually all the time.

We are now using it 24/7 because it is serving as an online backup, and very soon, the DR will activated on the product.

We invest in the backup so the continuity of the data is not affected.

It takes the sever directly from your VM environment.

The compression, encryption, and deduplicatuion are quite useful.

We are still exploring its features, but we want to see more features that we desire over time.

It is fairly stable.

At the moment, we have an administrator whose responsible for the device.

I am the only person handling the device. It is very straightforward, We have just one person in the organization, a consultant, and I don't go to the site on a daily basis.

I am happy with the technical support. Whenever I have contacted them, I have received the results that I was looking for.

This is the first time that we used this type of solution. We were quite happy with what we received.

The initial setup was quite good. There were no major hiccups.

Even the support teams supported us, which was quite helpful. The deployment took a few minutes. 

I am the consultant. I recommended this solution to my client.

I think this solution will help us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduce budgets. We will be moving more into that very soon.

The pricing could have been cheaper.

With another client, we had looked at Veritas. wihich is also quite stable. Between this solution and Veritas, I found this solution to be more user-friendly in terms of its interface.

Go for it. This solution suits organizations where there is no dedicated IT manpower. It can be managed by somebody, like a consultant, who can handle the entire thing. 

We are quite happy with the latest version and how it works. We are convinced that this is the right product.

I haven't used it with Microsoft Hyper-V.

The primary intended target for it was VMware backup and utilizing it in a VMware environment. It is a production, Active Directory, file server type of environment.

I am using the current version.

It hasn't improved the way our company functions from an operational standpoint.

The compression, encryption, and deduplication features are fabulous and great stuff.

What would have been most valuable for me, would have been the convenience and ease of doing the VMware backups along with the ability to provide a low-level, file level, restore all capability without having to structure the detailed Windows Backups association. So, an ease of setup with a granularity of a restore all capability without having to use a standard Windows Backup. I would need to upgrade my VM environment for this to work currently.

I investigated Vembu probably for the first time a couple of years back. I evaluated it in just a quick and dirty manner without any real followup on it. Subsequent to that, I have been more actively utilizing it for about a year.

It seems to be stable. No concerns about that.

Two people are required for deployment and maintenance of this solution.

My impression of the scalability is good. My scalability requirement isn't what some others might be, but the solution appears to be fully scalable.

It is being used in probably 80 percent of our environment. It's not a large environment. We probably won't scale out to the remainder. Eventually, the environment will be drawn in to the point where it's probably 100 percent of the environment that will be covered under Vembu, then that environment will be relatively stable. It won't change past that.

There are just a couple of us actually utilizing it. We're relatively small, so there are really just a couple of users for admin in there. It's a support environment.

From both the sales and technical support standpoint, they have been great. They have helped out to the extent that they can, but it hasn't been enough. There are things that they can't do and it's going to have to happen on my side (in my production environment). It was not clear from the evaluation level, when we ran through evaluation on it, that this was going to be an issue when we got to production.

Previously, it was a bit different because our environment had been a hosted environment. There was a different tool being utilized by the hosted provider. Our implementation of Vembu was a standup as we brought something in-house.

The initial setup was straightforward.

There were issues with the implementation because of incompatibilities between the tool implementation and our current VMware installation. So, it was an implementation issue that doesn't allow me to use it for VMware backup in the manner in which we would want to use it. That wasn't clear from the evaluation stage nor was it clear from the first utilization of it because it worked in the environment that it was being evaluated in. Based on that, we went ahead and made the purchase of the full implementation. At that point, it became clear that there would be limitations in that implementation that could not be overcome without doing upgrades to the production environment.

The evaluation and deployment took a couple of months.

To get through the evaluation did require support from from them. They were supportive and did provide that support.

There was an implementation strategy with some specific needs that were fulfilled by Vembu. It was an implementation strategy that included a consolidation and transition at the same time. It was a bit of a complex strategy and Vembu fulfilled it. Vembu was the tool of choice because of its ability to do that and because of the features in the suite. What was disconcerting was that it was able to do that part of it, but then when we went to put it into full production, then we encountered these other difficulties that hadn't been planned for or counted on.

To continue to do backups, we fell back to Windows Backup mode. We are still using the tool, but not in the manner in which we would have wanted. The tool purchase doesn't cover all options of the tool, e.g., if I go in and buy it, I have to buy it licensed for VMware Backups, not Windows Backups. At this point, what had to happen was they had to allow it to operate in Windows Backup so I could continue to back up the VMs, but in a trial mode. The trial mode has been extended once, and now we're reaching the limit of that extension again. Because I still haven't been able to update the production VMware environment such that the tool will operate in it in the manner in which I want it to operate, I'm stuck having to go back again to say, "Sorry, I need to extend this trial on it again." Even though I've paid, I'm still only able to operate in a trial mode. So, it's been difficult for us. 

I've purchased and been licensed for one aspect of it, which is my preferred method, but the pricing and licensing will not work for the short-term and I can't draw back.

Yes, we did survey others. We didn't match up evaluations. We just didn't have a lot of resources for it. There was a desktop environment to a test evaluation.

We primarily went with Vembu for its flexibility and features.

You should never evaluate in your production environment, but make sure your evaluation is done as close as possible to your target.

We are not using it with Hyper-V.

I would rate this product in the high eights or nine (out of 10).

Primary use is for vSphere or VMware.

• Ease of use
• Configuration
• Support

Live support would be helpful. I've communicated with them via email and through incidents. It might be better if you could have a chat or phone call because backups are important. You don't want to wait for an email. I know of other vendors that have a number you can call; they have people around the clock. It would be good to have a number you can call and your call is answered and taken care of, because backups normally occur at night, not during the day.

I would also like to see more documentation or videos. They have some videos out there on how to do steps, or for training, or to help you know more about their product.

Another leftover issue is that when you get notifications via email on an iPhone, there is only a certain amount of space to view it without having to open the email itself. I have four backup jobs. Their subject line shows "Vembu backup software..." and at the very end they put the server name and whether it succeeded or failed. I asked them if they could put the server name, and whether it succeeded or failed, first. That way, when I look through my emails it tells me whether it's succeeded or failed, and which server. Currently what I have to do is open up each email, and then scroll through to the very end, because it's a very long subject line. They say it's not customizable, and that they are going to look at improving on that in the future.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

I have enjoyed the support. They're very quick in turning around solutions for the issues and problems that I have had. You get a good turnaround. It takes a little while, but they document it. You can log in to their website and create a ticket, and see in real-time if it has been updated. It's really nice.

We went from a physical server to a virtual server. Vembu is cost-effective versus using VMware Essentials.

The setup wasn't altogether straightforward. There were a lot of items. It took me about two weeks before I could finally get things the way I needed them to be.

The product's pricing is a good value. Regarding licensing, make sure you find the right workstation or server that you're going to install it on, and know the number of sockets it has, since the price depends on that.

VMware Essentials, it has backup and restores capabilities. We also used BackupAssist.

Try it with the trial version. You get free rein of everything there. Test it out and make sure everything works right. You'll find it's easy to use and there is good support, as far as emails back and forth. That gives you plenty of time to try it, and then you can implement it once you've figured out all the items and how to get to things, as well as its limitations. That's pretty much what I did. I got a server and installed the full license and went to town. I put some backups on there and got familiar with it. It was pretty much straightforward.

Also, look at some of the training videos. They make it much clearer.

I like Vembu because of the price point, the ease of use, the support, and it being full-featured backup software for the needs that I have. I would rate it 10, but the one thing is the email notifications, that I mentioned above, that aren't customizable. Maybe adding more customization for the end-user, in the settings, some additional options, would help.

Backing up virtual machines, we use it for Windows Hyper-V platform in one data center, but we've also got future plans for a VMware Hypervisor platform in another data center. So thinking ahead, we chose Vembu.

It hasn't improved things, per se. It's an essential service, done automatically. I would say it is an essential backup system that matches the alternative solutions at the moment in a relatively cost-effective way.

The automated backup of multiple virtual machines. We can back up two hypervisors, one is Microsoft Hyper-V and the other one is VMware Hypervisor.

It is very easy, unless you know exactly what you're doing, to corrupt the virtual machines and they get locked up. Just brief detail: When you are creating a system, if you don't have absolutely every other little background processes in place, it creates Snapshots of the virtual machines. Once it does that, it then won't be able to have a backup. From that point on you have to destroy the virtual machine, which is completely counterproductive on a large system. There is a fundamental flaw in the setup that can be very dangerous, potentially. So that needs to be avoided; whoever writes the software for doing that needs to make sure that that cannot happen.

I have fed that back to the developers. I don't know whether they're going to make that change, but they can't put that responsibility onto customers. It's their software that needs to be able to not allow that to happen. I've not had any response to say, "Yes, we'll do it." So that's a little bit of a fault as well. When we do give feedback we don't get any commitment. Like this survey, we're being asked the questions, but when we give feedback, we don't actually get any response at all.

When it's backing up, it's okay. We've used it to restore the system and that restore system worked. We get an email report on various operations, so we know if something has failed or not. It's operating fine.

We've not encountered any trouble with scalability.

Their tech support is okay, but they don't respond in time to sort out the problem. We sorted it out ourselves. We fed back the answer. There wasn't any thank you. There wasn't any acknowledgment. There wasn't even any appreciation of what we'd actually done, something like, "Yeah, yeah, you shouldn't have done that." That kind of thing. Very basic support. There is a willingness to help and respond, but in actually solving the problem, they're not very good at all.

Then, once we did solve it, there was no understanding of what had been done, so it's at that level that it is lacking. This issue was over New Year's time. I was actually on holiday in India. I had to waste a whole day rebuilding a system from a corrupt backup. And again, no support from the Vembu guys, at all. Once we showed them what had been done, again, no acknowledgment that they'd safeguard this in the future.

It has been several months now and I'm not in a position to be chasing them to improve the product in that way. So it's still there, in potential, for future Vembu customers to hit the problem that we had and they might not be as tolerant or be able to fix it. We're an IT company ourselves, so we do understand the nature of the software that they're running and the problems, but there are major flaws in the design at set up time.

We haven't actually switched. We do use Microsoft Azure backup systems. We've used our own online backup systems. We've used in-built data center backup solutions a well, so there are a number of solutions. All of them have their weak points. The Vembu one is working and it's stable.

We had problems, initially in setting it up. There was a major bug and the backup process, it corrupted one of our virtual machines which was a live customer system. That wasn't very good. Now that has been sorted and we know how to avoid it, but at the beginning, it wasn't a good system. It has been fixed and it has been working fine since.

It was supposed to be straightforward but it caused major technical issues that were difficult to fix. They were actually unfixable, the problems. We had to basically destroy live production systems.

Pricing is a good value.

Licensing seems okay. I suppose the more volume you put through the system, it would be good to have a volume licensing discount. We're a managed IT service provider, so we're backing up not just our own systems but all our clients'. In that regard, as we grow, we're putting business through Vembu. There is not any specific partner incentive at all. So that would be nice to see.

Microsoft Azure. I can't remember the others but there were a few; the data center ones, but I haven't got specific names. The in-built ones in VMware.

When you do a search on Google about half a dozen pop up and we looked at some of them. With some of them were put off by their business models. So even before we evaluated them, their business models weren't acceptable. The nice thing about Vembu is the subscription, on a monthly basis. It fits into our business models.

I would tell others looking into implementing this solution exactly what steps need to be done in the setup. I've actually documented it, and I've passed that on to the Vembu guys. Take that, and make sure that things are set up very clearly, not, "There you go, it's very straightforward, it'll take you five minutes." It's not like that at all. The marketing of the setup is so misleading. It can cause a lot of problems. They need to be more honest in the way things need to be set up. That would be okay, that doesn't put people off when you have to go through a process. But just saying it's straightforward and it's simple is a bit of a lie, especially if it causes a lot of problems. So there needs to be more documentation on exactly what to set up in what order, and how to do it and what not to do.

Regarding technical support, sometimes, if you pick the wrong time of day to get through you get this constant "We value your business, we're busy at the moment..." and you can be on the phone for ages because it gets redirected to America. You get the feeling that they're not actually busy, they just have some automated lady giving you a message. Again, that engenders mistrust in the technology. It needs to be not advertised as 24/7. It needs to be advertised with the specific hours that support can be provided. That would help a lot, not just saying 24/7 and then not actually providing it.

It goes to America, but it is actually answered in India. It's all confusing. If it's 3 o'clock in India, we understand that they'll be asleep, so why not say we operate at these times, and people will understand that, rather than pretending redirect to an American number, where you're expecting somebody to pick up the phone. But they're picking it up from India at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's forced us to be hanging on to the phone for a long time, while nobody has got any intention of picking up the phone.

In terms of my rating of the solution, I have to do so on two levels. The first is the implementation and that would be a two out of 10. It was bad. But in terms of once it's operating, I would give it a nine.

The biggest improvement has been the ability to allow us as an MSSP to continuously gather extra revenue from this software, so we can use it to back up our clients' data offsite. This is one of the reasons why we enjoy the product and we've enjoyed using it for this long.

When it comes to backup software, one of the biggest things that I use to enjoy about StoreGrid, this changed recently, was the support.

I enjoy the ease of the UI and how simple it is to use compared to other products.

They had a good product and tried to change things by going to a different product. They should have tried to stay with a product that is a proven solution and successful.

One of the biggest things that they lack at the moment, which their competitors currently have, is a hardware device that we can deploy at a client's location. We can have local backup stored on the device and replicate over to our cloud. That's basically one of the biggest concerns that we see for their company that we currently think they are lacking compared to other competitors.

Two or three years ago, they had an amazing support team, especially for the StoreGrid product, which is something that we're currently using. But around a year and a half ago, they brought out a new product called BDR, which from my understanding is horrible. We tried it and didn't like that the support just started going down a bit. They started transitioning more to the BDR side and left the StoreGrid part out.

The system is very stable. It's ideal for our day-to-day basis. I've been using StoreGrid ever since I started working here over five years. It's a good product. We haven't upgraded to the latest patch they've released, and the product still works fine. Overall, we think the actual system software works great. 

I have encountered some stability issues, but certain things are awkward to do when it comes to restoring and pulling data, e.g., cracking Exchange databases, pulling emails, and restoring mailboxes.

I would give technical support a five out of 10, because we've had issues in the past where calls haven't been answered. I do call them a lot and the majority of the times, I'm going to the United States, although I know this company is based out of India, and they have offices here. However, when I call during the weekends I've had the following issues:

• Calls which aren't being picked up.
• Phone rings for hours.
• Calls go directly to voicemail.
• Emergency over weekend where they didn't get back to me for over 32 hours.
• Often takes over two days for me to get somebody on support.

Originally, it seemed like they were staffed for the actual support need, but now it doesn't appear like it. Only in the past few months have I seen minor improvements. I do understand that in the past year or so, there have been some changes.

However, when it comes to knowledge, they're always willing to help; I would say they're always on top of things. As for being knowledgeable, I would rate them as an eight out of 10.

I didn't previously use a different solution. I really don't remember because when I took on this position, the solution was already out here. From my understanding though, we did use a similar solution. It really comes down to pricing.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It's fairly simple and easy, and they make our lives a lot easier when dealing with the licensing and actually purchasing licensing, keeping them in the vault, keeping them in our bank. It gives us an additional way to resell and earn a little extra here and there from other clients. When we do build out servers, backup servers, for them and we have them out on site, we can obviously use the licensing to license their system to obviously mark up and make some money.

Somebody already took on that decision prior to my being here.

Give it a chance. It's a decent product, although not the best of its kind. It is lacking in certain aspects. A piece of hardware being deployed out at a client's office would be ideal. There are a lot of products out there, and it's in the middle of the pack.