BDRSuite Reviews

The primary use case is to be able to back up data outside of on-premise with the ability to restore as fast as possible. We also use Vembu NetworkBackup to selectively back up files on the file share along with our virtual machines. It gives us more control over what we can backup and restore, especially in the files.

We use this solution to back up our virtual environments. 

All the features are valuable for different reasons. 

The restoring of virtual machines and deduplication features are good. We save time by recreating or deduplicating a machine, as it done automatically. With one or two clicks, we can get something done. We are then pretty sure it is the same as it was before; it is a real duplicate. The deduplication features are useful for accelerating the transfers and when we have more than one version of a virtual machine or backup without taking up X time or space.

If we do a backup of a machine at some point and the server crashes, then we can restore this machine to a different server with the same settings and setup. We will just have to tweak one or two things, like the IP. Then, it is ready to go. This is not quite high availability. However, if we use the replication feature to make an exact copy of the machine, then we can tweak them to work together as active-active or active-passive. This can help us to save time because the deduplication is done automatically without errors and we have minimal changes to do.

I like also the feature where you back up a virtual machine, then it will run a startup and you can take a screenshot of the first few seconds of the bootup. This way, at a quick glance, we can determine the backup is bootable and whether the backup of the virtual machine will be functional or not. Sometimes testing the backup is something that we don't always do on a regular basis until we find out that something is broken. Then, we didn't know until it's too late. So, this feature is appreciated.

With the configuration of backups, there are a few things I would change with the UI. 

One thing that I reported with the backups: When there are accentuated characters in a path, then we can't restore documents into a folder. There is a bug with the restoration and restoring files with accentuated characters in the path. Hopefully, they have repaired this because otherwise we will restore files and find out that they are not there.

A little over a year.

It is pretty stable.

I have just two physical machines with five or six VMs each. It is not that big of a setup. From a scalability perspective, I don't know if it will be good or not, but I believe it will be.

There are three users of the solution: a VP of operations, someone who is a jack-of-all-trades, and myself. There is no one with a specific skill set for this. It is really easy to figure out.

The technical support has been good. They have been dedicated to resolving issues.

Vembu was the first solution of this type. This solution was recommended to us.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to install. There are not too many options and it was ready to go almost out-of-the-box. We have a really simple setup so the deployment took an hour or two. 

We have seen ROI based on confidence and time saved. We save a few hundred dollars a year.

We have the enterprise version with two server licenses.

Take a look at the pricing and licensing closely. When we installed the BDR disaster recovery server, which is the duplication of the backup data on one server onto a second one where the backup data resides, it was not clear that this DR server needed two other licenses. These licenses were to back up the copy of the first backup server that had two licenses for the two physical host that it was backing up in the first place. Moving files around to a second DR server, why would I need an extra two licenses? I don't know if it's to make money, but it was not very obvious and I had to abort the project from there because I didn't plan to pay for extra licenses to copy data of the first two physical servers. I also didn't understand why it was needed. Hopefully, they will improve the explanation in the documentation for this.

I compared different vendors' functionalities, our requirements, and price. We chose this solution because it was cheaper and easier to use than Veeam and other solutions of this type. Though they are not easy to compare as they all have different licensing models.

Make sure you have a clear view of your architecture and how you will be implementing it. Decide upfront which site will receive the backup and which site will do the deduplication of the backup's redundancy. As mentioned, I started to do some backups on the second office site and wanted to move the backups on to third site for disaster recovery, but I figured out that it would be better to install the backup server on the third site and the deduplication on the second site. However, just exchanging their roles was not that easy because I was missing licensing and backups were already running. I would recommend to ask questions, figure out the licensing model, what needs to be installed where, and their best practices. For example, if I have to do things again, I would do things differently.

I would give the product a seven (out of 10).

We use it for backing up virtual machines.

The ability to back up virtual machines is the main reason I use it.

Vembu software runs on a Windows Server. The Windows Server has to be connected to the internet so it can connect with Vembu’s servers. It has to connect with Vembu. For some reason, if it doesn't connect, it stops working, and I don't know why on earth they do that. They require it to connect to the internet and connect with Vembu for it to continue to function. If the internet is down or if the server can't reach the internet, it stops working after a few days. That's not great because there are some people who want to do backups but they don't want to have their server accessible on the internet.

I think that's a horrible design, but it's purposely built in that way. It's something that they put in the product, and I don't know why they did that. To me, that’s a terrible design.

If you bought a new car in the year 2525, a Ford, and your car had to have a connection to the Ford dealership or the Ford company and the connection stopped, and then your Ford car was going to stop working in three days, what would you think about that? But that's the way this software works. They did it, and it’s a horrible design. That's what I don't like about it.

I have never had stability issues with the product.

I haven't had to scale it. It was a small environment so there was no need for me to scale or grow, so I can't really comment as to the scaling capacity.

Technical support gets an A-plus.

The reason I use Vembu is to back up my virtual machines. You can back up virtual machines manually but Vembu does it automatically. I'd rather have it updated and backed up automatically, without my having to think about it, rather than for me to have to remember to do it every couple of weeks. This is just an automated way to do something that you should do, and that's the reason why I have it.

The previous process I had was to manually back it up, but now it's automatic and I don't have to worry about it.

It was pretty easy to set it up.

When I upgraded my VMware to version 6, Vembu provided me with an update. That was just a continuation of what it did, but at least they provided the update.

I didn’t do an ROI spreadsheet because this is a time-saver. You can't sell it on ROI. You can sell it on the fact that it is a time-saving tool.

Vembu is too expensive because they don't really have small-business pricing. This is a matter of personal opinion. They're going to tell you that they have competitive pricing because there are more expensive solutions in the marketplace, but there are better solutions in the marketplace that are more expensive. Their product is a better fit for small businesses, but they don't price it that way.

I think they're losing a lot of money by pricing it too high. If the alternative is to manually do backups and they start charging ridiculous pricing for their products, they're not going to sell that many copies. That's probably why they don't. They've got a good product, but they price themselves out of business. That's my opinion.

If I were running Vembu, I would have a small-business suite that's priced for small business. I would allow customers to buy it without a partner, just go direct and price it for small businesses. They would make a lot more money, but they don't want to do that. They want to try to price it ridiculously. It's their call, it’s their product. They made it.

I know many companies won't bother at that price. They’ll just do it manually. I know because I know the market very well here, in the US. I don't think Vembu is a US company. I don't know where they're from.

Their product does a good job. It's just not meant for large environments, so they’re pricing themselves too high. That's just my opinion. Someone will come in and force them to lower their price. As soon as another company comes in, does an online version of it or it does a cost-effective version, they’re going to be forced to deal with this if they want to sell more licenses.

There were other options, but I liked this product. I thought it was easy to use so I took it on. I worked for a partner at the time, and I was going to try to resell it, but I found it to be just too expensive.

The other solution that seems to do better for enterprise customers, the big companies, like Trader Joe's, big retail outlets like that or large grocery stores or hospitals, is Veeam. Veeam costs a little bit more. As expensive as Vembu is, Veeam is actually a little bit more. But because Veaam is meant for larger companies, they sell more instances of it. And by the time you buy the 25-license or 30-license version, it's actually cheaper.

Veeam seems to have much more presence in the marketplace because it's more competitive and scales much larger. I've used Veeam and it's harder to install it, it's harder to get it working. Veeam offers a free version and a small-business solution, but that version doesn't scale well. It's too big. It's like selling a truck to a person who needs a small car. That’s Veeam. Whereas Vembu, they sell a small car, but they want to price it like the huge truck.

Try to negotiate the price. Try to get it to the right price. As a partner, I would try to position it for small and medium-size businesses. I would work with Veeam and say, “Listen. I can't sell it at that price. You're going to have to be more competitive.” As a partner, I would recommend working more with Veeam. It's easy to sell because it's a good product, but I'd be working on the price. It's easy to implement, easy to set up. You can be low a low-tech company and get someone to figure out how to do it easily enough. 

The challenge I would have would be getting Vembu to price it competitively. If they aren't willing to, just go with Veeam or tell them to do a manual backup or go with some other solution.

Vembu is a great product. It's priced too high, but it's a good product.

We use it to back up a test lab type of environment. It's a virtual environment where we use Hyper-V.

The way it improves our organization is that we haven't worried about looking at backups in about a year or so, it's just been running on its own. It also delivers an enterprise-level of data protection and helps with our budget. I estimate we have saved $3,000 - $4,000.

The most valuable feature is the Hyper-V backup - it's just one click. I don't have to worry about it.

There's a feature that does syncing with AWS Cloud backup online. It's not that straightforward to get it set up.

We haven't encountered any issues with the stability of the product.

I haven't tested the scalability yet.

Tech support has been pretty good. I've reached out to them a couple of times and they answered my questions. The support has been pretty decent.

We previously used Veeam. Vembu is much cheaper than the competitor, than the Veeam suite. That's why we went with it.

It was very easy to set up. It took us about 30 minutes to deploy it.

I prefer the way Vembu is licensed. When you look at Veeam or any other product, they price per node. Vembu is licensed per host. You just buy a host license and it backs up unlimited VMs within that host. The others charge per VM.

We evaluated Veeam, Comet, and Windows' built-in backup.

Look at the options out there. If you're looking for a cheaper solution go with this. If you're looking for more features and integrations with other solutions, then you would have to go Veeam.

Although we use it with Hyper-V, I don't know if it enables high-availability. We currently just have the one user, the test environment backup.

I rate Vembu a nine out of ten. The one point off is because the cloud sync options are not that straightforward to set up.

Backup virtual machines on VMware.

I am able to verify we have availability of our VMs in case a failure occurs.

• Quick backup and restore
• Very simple and understandable interface

I am still testing restores and it seems some problems may be related to our hardware. Because we have not implemented the correct hardware yet I cannot be sure where the problem is.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

I run into the problem of their chat service not being available frequently. I like chat as it is quick.

When it is not available I have to get a support ticket going. I was asked to provide a TeamViewer number and that was fine. However, I was waiting for a while and needed to go to lunch. If the TeamViewer session could be accessed either within 15 minutes or scheduled, so I know when they will connect, it would be helpful. It is really necessary that I be available during the session as there are questions. I do not want to be chained to my computer while I wait for the session to start.

The prior solution took hours to restore a computer. When it was done it had an error that the support staff couldn't figure out. While they were trying to figure it out, I installed a trial version of Vembu BDR with no assistance from Vembu support as it was so simple. I was able to perform a backup and restore easily. And the most important item was the restore time which took 15 minutes.

Very straightforward. It seemed to be mostly intuitive, although in some areas I had to think about the functionality. I then referred to the instructions and had no issues.

The pricing structure is in line with other solutions. However, the option to replicate offsite to a unit at another office or at home is a big cost benefit. Instead of paying monthly for cloud storage, you replicate offsite for free. If preferred, you can also replicate to Vembu offsite.

We currently use StorageCraft ShadowProtect which is a really good product. As we move forward with Vembu we will want to standardize on Vembu. It seems it is more flexible as a total solution for physical, virtual, file/image backups and offsite provision.

Download the product and give it a run through. With some products, this is a tough process as you spend a lot of time testing and they don't work correctly or have enough benefit to justify a purchase. Then, you have wasted all that time. But Vembu was quick and simple enough, it did not waste a lot of time.

We use it for backup copies of key virtual servers in our company.

Fortunately, we have not had to recover lost data. However, it is reassuring to know that we can recover lost data, if needed.

The most valuable features are ease of setup and configuration.

I have not been impressed by the data compression of the backup images. They seem to take up nearly as much space on the backup drive as they do on the server.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not faced any challenges with its ability to  scale.

Their technical support is very good to work with, as they are able to propose alternate solutions to problems that work well for us.

We did not previously use a different solution. Vembu was selected after reviewing, then trying several different products.

The initial setup was straightforward and well-documented.

We were able to take advantage of a promotional pricing campaign. 

I do not know how often Vembu offers the promotional pricing campaign, but it can be cost advantageous.

In addition to Vembu, we evaluated Veeam, Unitrends, and Virten as alternative solutions.

Verify that you can restore a virtual machine (VM) from its backup and ensure the notification of backup results (success or fail) is readily available.

It has provided us with a value-added service for our customers, aiding us in becoming a one stop shop for all IT and Communication requirements.

The intuitive GUI, ease of use for doing any type of backup.

The Support for Exchange 2016 mailboxes, a daily report for all customers on their last backup (Current report misses some information)

The Backup solution has been very stable and any issues have been promptly addressed by the Vembu support team.

Customer Service:

Customer service is always excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is always excellent.

We switched to another solution only because vembu were discontinuing the product, glad to hear they continued it and we came back on board.

It was extremely simple to setup and we were working in no time at all.

We advise them to check out other solutions but we are very competitive. We license by server/application and storage allocation.

In-house.

It is between 15–30%

We advise them to check out other solutions, but we are very competitive. We license by server/application and storage allocation.

Our backups are done on a nightly basis. We don’t run out of space on the backup drives; no tapes/hard drives have to be stored or swapped out.

The online backup feature allows me to store my backups off-site without having to physically drive them somewhere.

There have been times when the backup hangs and does not complete possibly due to a connection issue. Stopping and starting the service usually works to restart it. It would be good if there was a way for it to automatically restart.

There have been times when stopping and starting the service did not work and I had to call support. This has not happened recently, though.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is good. They are always willing to help and will see the problem through, right up to its resolution.

Initially, we did onsite backups to tapes and then to hard drives. We switched because we wanted an off-site solution.

The initial setup wasn’t too bad. Once we got everything working, it has been running okay.

It is easy to add products. The pricing is reasonable.

You should definitely consider using this tool, as an off-site backup option.

We use it for replication to our disaster recovery sites for the storage we have on-prem. We needed our critical infrastructure and our critical applications backed up. We needed to have something we can restore from when we have an issue.

Our environment is hybrid. We have some of our servers on-prem, some on Azure, and some on AWS.

With Hyper-V it helps to ensure high availability. Before I started using Vembu, if I wanted to back up my Hyper-V what I would normally do is go to the folder where I have the VM and copy the hard disk, the VM image. With that I would be able to restore easily. With Vembu, with just the click of a button, it does my backup. I've done a series of restores to test what I'm backing up because that's the essence of a backup — to see how it comes back — and it comes out fine. In VMware you don't just copy your image, but for VMware Vembu also does a perfect job.

Vembu has also ensured that the disaster recovery aspect of our business is well taken care of. It is very critical to the business to have a tested backup. Vembu has helped us a lot in that way. We have restored from Vembu backups several times.

It has saved us a lot of money, but it's not quantifiable. If you have an issue that would cost a whole lot of money but you have a proper backup solution so you don't have to spend that money, you just restore. It might have saved us millions, in Nigerian money.

It saves us time because I just schedule the backups the way I want them and that's it. I don't have to worry about my backups. I'm certain that my data has been backed up. It saves a whole lot of man-hours.

The backup is very reliable for both VMware and Hyper-V.

In terms of the compression, Vembu's product is quite good compared to what I've seen from other products. 

The encryption is okay. That security feature is fine. You have the option of either encrypting the backup or not. I don't use it in all cases, but I will use it if I'm backing up something and it will be taken outside of our environment. For example, if I'm backing up a VM to an external tape drive or hard drive, I will use that option, to give it another level of security.

They keep on improving and I can't see anything that they need to add for now.

We have been using Vembu for the past four years.

This year was the first time I had an issue with it. I don't know how the issue started. I called their support team and they told me what to do. I tried it but I then decided to simply do a fresh installation.

Vembu is very scalable because it gives you everything you could want. Our environment is medium-sized.

We definitely have plans to expand our usage of it. When you get value from a product you love to do more with it.

I love Vembu's customer care. If you have any issues or questions, they respond and their response time is quick. Their technical support is good. I would rate it at eight out of 10. I had a conversation with them last night. I sent them an email and they immediately responded.

Prior to using Vembu I tried Acronis. That is what we were using before we dropped it for Vembu. The main difference I see between Vembu and the other solutions we've tried is that with Vembu, you don't need anybody to tell you what to do. Once you have done the installation you just look at the user interface — it's very friendly — and you can do things yourself without resorting to help from anybody.

If I want to back up a VM or all the servers I have in vSphere, I just drop the password of vSphere and it will do everything automatically for you. You just tell it what you want to back up. Acronis doesn't work that way. The guys on my team found Acronis difficult to use. In terms of user-friendliness, Vembu does a better job. With the click of a button, you know what you need to do.

Acronis would time out most of the time. If you have a slight network-connectivity issue, it causes a problem.

I found Vembu by searching online for free backup solutions. I saw a lot of solutions but that is how I started with Vembu, with their free version. I saw that it solved my problems.

To install Vembu, the only thing that takes time is the download. But once you have downloaded it, within 30 minutes you are up and running. You schedule your backups and you go to sleep.

I was the only one involved in the setup.

There are two guys on my team who maintain it. They have administrative rights on Vembu, like me. They also have many other responsibilities besides Vembu. It doesn't take a lot of effort to maintain it. Once you're up and running you just check your backups and the status to make sure that everything is running. And if there is an issue, you check the log to see why you are having that issue.

I did not need a third-party to deploy Vembu. But when I used Acronis, I had to call their support. Acronis has a partner here in Nigeria that I worked with. The fact that I had to work with a partner with Acronis, and I didn't have to with Vembu, is a major difference.

The overall return on investment is quite good. It's good for the business. The margin is on the positive side.

The pricing of Vembu could be better. They have a good product, and I know good products cost money, but they need to find a balance.

I also looked at Veeam. I used Veeam for a while before Acronis. Veeam is a fantastic product. I think it is one of the best. It is in the same class with Vembu. I went with Vembu because it is very easy to use. It is easy to install. With the click of a button you can manage everything: add a VM and do your backup.

It gives me peace of mind. If your infrastructure backup is up and running and trusted, it gives you peace of mind.

I have recommended it to a number of people.

It's important to note that most backup solutions will tell you that you can download and use their solution for free. But the truth is that that is not the case for almost all of them. After some time, you will have to pay for a license to backup critical sources.