BDRSuite Reviews

On the client side of it, the ease of installing the software and getting it up and running: Each version they bring up, it gets better and better.

• The support side of it
• The usability, the ease of it: It is user friendly. We've tried other software before and it wasn't that great on the user front, but this software seems pretty straightforward.

While it's hard to say, the support side of it is sometimes a bit hit or miss; the tech support. Generally, I would say about 70% of the time, they're pretty good. They're pretty accurate on what we want, and the odd times, I think it’s lost in translation.
We've had a few bugs with the software and, for some reason, we've always had to get their support to dial in to fix it. It's not something that we can fix ourselves, really.

Generally, we have not encountered any stability issues.

So far, scalability seems OK. We've only grown, not masses, with this software, so it's hard to say, really.

Technical support is 7/10, on average. They could make it better by improving the speed of responses. Sometimes, they'll dial us back in a few minutes; sometimes, it takes them half a day before they have a look at it.

We previously used a different solution. The ease of user feel is really the reason we switched over to it.

The initial setup is going back quite a while back. I think it was in the middle: it wasn't too straightforward; it wasn't that tricky. It was average.

It's pretty straightforward to use once the software gets going.

We use it for backing up VMs.

We are using it with VMware and the benefit is that we have reliable backups.

It's pretty basic backup stuff. I set it up and it just runs.

The compression, encryption, and deduplication features all work fine.

The system died twice and it was apparently the result of corrupted disk sectors. I tried to work with tech support to fix it, but they essentially gave up. So twice, I had to rebuild our server. I don't know why that happened and tech support didn't seem particularly concerned about figuring it out. That's my only complaint.

We've been using Vembu BDR Suite for about a year.

It did completely die twice and couldn't be revived. If that happens again, we're probably going to look at another product. My only concern is the stability.

We're not likely to be adding too many more VMs anytime soon. So I don't have any way of judging the scalability. We might deploy it on another site. We'll see about that.

Technical support is good but the problem I have is that I often can't understand the technicians because they have extremely heavy accents, and that makes communication kind of difficult.

We were using VDP, which is a free application from ESX. But it's not very good, in fact it's awful, and it's no longer supported. We replaced it with Vembu and we're quite happy.

The initial setup is simple. It didn't take more than a day or so, including testing. I got a trial version and decided it did what we want it to do and then I just set it up.

The solution provides us with enterprise-level data protection.

The pricing is quite reasonable.

If you can't afford Veeam, which is very expensive, I would recommend Vembu.

Vembu is used by me and another system administrator. That's it. We manage it, but it only requires one person for deployment and maintenance. 

Our end-users don't know it's there.

We use it for our file server and database backups.

It hasn't improved the way our company functions that much because we were using a backup which is about the same as Vembu.

The restore feature is the most valuable. It's easy to restore.

We've been using Vembu for less than a year.

It's not that stable yet. Every two weeks, my backup will stop and I have to check it. Sometimes it can be fixed by a restart and sometimes I need support to make it work.

It's scalable. It is being used extensively in our environment, but there are no plans to increase usage. During the season, we're around 200 employees and we back up about 4 TBs.

Support is very important. But sometimes they respond to me four hours after I contact them, maybe more. I would like them to improve their response time. Also, their time zone is different from US/Canada.

Overall, support is very good, but their reaction takes a while.

We were using Zenith ARCA. We switched to Vembu because of the licensing cost. Vembu is cheaper.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's just "click" and "okay."

The deployment took an hour or two. The installation plan was to store things locally. We have an online license for the offsite service, but we don't have the proper device installed yet. It requires a more sophisticated machine.

Initially, I worked on it myself. But, due to some errors, I asked support to reinstall it, to fix it. They were good.

We have seen a return on investment from going with Vembu.

The pricing is pretty normal. It's not too hard to license a server. It's pretty straightforward. If you need four servers, you just acquire four.

We evaluated Ipirius. We went with Vembu because of its features. It's similar to what we were using previously.

If you're looking for a not-too-expensive solution, use the Vembu BDR Suite.

There are three people on our team who can access the server, who can actually operate it: an IT associate, supervisor, and system admin. In terms of maintenance, I ask their support to do it.

Overall, I would rate Vembu at seven out of 10. It's not perfect yet. It doesn't give me confidence that it will run 24/7.

It gave us an easy to use and stable backup service to offer our customers for a low price.

Central management and easy control of allowed space per client makes end user and client management easy.

The service is built on MCALs, so implement a policy in which someone keeps refilling these. But overall, MCAL is a nice way to be dealing with licenses.

We ran into some problems in which the server hosting the backup service needed to be restarted once a week. We contacted support and they resolved the issue within a week!

We didn’t have any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

We did have a previous solution, but it was almost 10 years ago. We were not happy. The provider and the software didn’t work as we hoped. We called it “one-time-backup” internally.

The setup was straightforward and support was always available if needed.

The cost is low and has always been. We haven’t found any cheaper solution for our demands. By using the MCAL, we feel safe and secure. It is kind of “straightforward” to add new licenses for the backups.

We did evaluate other solutions.

Use the support. They are knowledgeable and will resolve any issues you may have. They will contact you directly so that you have a person to talk to. You can tell that Vembu focuses on customer support.

Another plus is the ease of use for the users. In our environment, we sell it as a service and our customers install the backup-client themselves.

When migrating systems or doing a reinstall, Vembu has a really easy-to-use system to re-implement the backup jobs and rules. Short spoken: The end user experience is great and easy to use!

We were looking for a product with Automatic backup replication and a product that would support MSP rebranding.

I wouldn't use the term 'improved' as the product implementation in the end was a complete failure. The implementation however did serve the purpose of allowing us to grow our BDR service offering from a technical perspective by seeing how things shouldn't be done and then looking at ways of overcoming these issues.

The vendor support service. Operating out of India and not really taking into account the time difference for support tickets meant we were getting responses to our support requests at midnight, when no one was at work to be able to address them. High priority issues which should have at most a 2 hour SLA were not responded to because the support service was not 24x7. The vendor support SLA for this product was terrible.

We used it for 12 months.

The Linux based deployments were fairly easy to manage, however the constant updates were annoying. The MYSQL databases would corrupt themselves which then required a support technician to resolve. Backup jobs would report as have run successfully and then when we checked the data the job had only run for 1 minute

There were issues with the software's ability to handle low bandwidth connections such as ADSL. There were stability issues with running the software on both windows and linux, the advancements of the updates to resolve issues would fix some issues and then create more which points back to issues with Quality Assurance.

The service was able to handle our requirements from a scalability perspective. There were no issues with being able to scale the product upward, however the demands of the software on the hardware CPU would require that the supporting backup server hardware would need to be improved as demand increased.

Extremely Poor. There were no real SLA's available and when we tried to contact our Account Manager for the product they would not respond sometimes for 5 hours after we contacted them.

When they eventually responded they were actually very knowledgable on the product.

Slightly complex, as the installation requires MySQL which is not native to windows so running on windows or Linux requires knowledge of command line for MySQL.

In-house, we were required to know the product to be able to support it as much as possible prior to engaging vendor support.

About $50,000 of lost revenue due to Research and Development Capital expenditure and Labour to setup, we never got the product into a position where it was profitable.

The original setup cost was supposed to be around $25,000 of R&D investment. We are not using this product anymore, it was never profitable for us. I don't recommend investing the time into pursuing this product.

No this one was chosen based on price and rebranding potential.

Look at Dell App Assure.

It is a backup and disaster recovery solution for small businesses. I use it primarily for Vista machines.

The backup is constant so it makes things simpler for me. To put it simply, it just works.

• Snapshots
• Constant backup for SQL, application services, and Active Directory
• External disaster recovery
• Small memory footprint when running

It's also easy to use because of the graphical user interface. It's simple enough for a child to use. With Vembu Cloud I can view the status of all my clients' backups. I can configure backups from the interface. I am able to do 99 percent of what I need to do from the GUI.

I suggest that the dump of the database have the option to either be backed up to Vembu Cloud or be backed up to all backup sites and not only to default storage.

If the backup server crashes I create another backup server and use the backups and the database dumps. I have to use the default path of the backups. It would be a great option if I could just import the backup files.

In the past, I had some stability issues but I no longer have them. It was corrected in the last version. It is working without problems now.

Scalability is not a problem.

The support from Vembu is very, very good. These guys have saved my life two or three times.

I have used many solutions up until now. I switched to Vembu because of the price.

The initial setup is simple. It is not complicated. The only thing that makes it more complicated is when there are a lot of databases.

I would rate it at 9 out of 10. It's a great option for a small business looking for a cheap solution requiring two or three different backup sites. Vembu provides strong support. I am not giving it a higher score because it is complicated to recover a crashed backup server.