We use it for simple, day-to-day backup of files and of virtual machines. But the overall requirement is to have a system in place that meets disaster recovery and business continuity requirements, which this does.
It is a physical deployment with replication to cloud.
One of the main benefits is that Infrascale reduces the heavy lifting, for me and my colleagues, in terms of ensuring the protection of the client's assets. Much of that is now automated and monitored through the solution, and it's also monitored by the technical folks within Infrascale.
In addition, if we have any issues, we have points of escalation, by way of the support, that we can contact to assist in resolving those issues.
Given that we are in the hurricane belt, the spin-up of replicated servers in the cloud is among the most valuable features. If our site goes down we can just connect to the cloud appliance, spin up the servers, and we are good to go.
It's also important that the solution’s Critical Server Insurance protects physical and virtual servers, to facilitate 24/7 access to the servers, regardless of the disaster that might have occurred. And it is definitely a key, for us, that this feature allows you to spin up locally or in the cloud, on-demand, and without declaration or extra fees.
The overall ease of use and ease of management of the solution using the Infrascale Dashboard is also very good.
The backup functionality is efficient and effective. It's efficient because of the deduplication during backup and replication, and the encryption of the data makes it quite effective.
There is room for improvement by making the interface a little more intuitive when navigating to recover flat files or an old server.
I haven't pursued the training as much as I possibly should have, so I don't know what is available in that regard. But from my own experience, if there were more self-training available, such as videos, that would be helpful.
In addition, there's always room for improvement with the dashboards. There's a lot of information on the dashboard and, while it is good at the moment, continuous improvement is always a good thing.
We have been using Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery for about five or six years.
It's very stable.
The scalability of the solution is effective, based on the appliances and the way they are sized, as well as the variables that are factored into sizing for scaling.
But in terms of overage, or outgrowing capacity with backups, I have an issue. I've had a couple of clients that, for some reason, have had their backups go over the capacity that we have. Fortunately, that doesn't stop the whole process of backups. But in terms of reducing the data that is stored to bring it back within the limits, that seems to be something that either cannot be done or I don't fully understand how to do it. The situation has come up a couple of times and there's one particular technician who has been very good in assisting, but it's not that we've been able to bring it below the limit. It's just that he has extended the limit and then spoken with the account manager to explain the situation. That is a concern for me.
Technical support is an eight out of 10. It's not a 10 because, on a couple of occasions, I've been put in touch with technicians who seem a little less knowledgeable than others, although these occurrences happened some time ago. I know now that once a couple of particular names come up, I'm in good hands because they are very knowledgeable and very expedient in troubleshooting and rectifying issues.
The level of commitment of the support team to me, as a customer, has gotten better over time. Initially, it wasn't particularly great, but that's in line with what I just said about the experience and knowledge.
The support team is proactive such that I am told if a resolution isn't readily available, and I am given an explanation as to their next steps for going away and researching. The tickets are always updated. And what is important to me is that when I communicate or respond to an email, or raise further information or queries, there is a timely response.
Positive
We did have a previous solution, but the switch to Infrascale was because of functionality that wasn't readily available in the old one. And I don't believe that solution was being continually improved, commensurate with client requirements and industry standards.
The initial setup was straightforward.
The aspect that was a challenge, initially, was the sizing exercise. The sizing has improved since I first used it, but I feel that some technical people might not really understand some of the questions that are being asked and, therefore, may answer them incorrectly. And that could lead to incorrect sizing. That process could always be improved and streamlined.
Other than that, implementation has been straightforward, from the booking of the implementation, receiving of the appliance, and then working with the technicians on the provisioning. That was fine. All of those steps have been good experiences.
I have done several deployments of Infrascale for clients, and overall, they have taken about three man-hours, maximum. That time has been spread over a number of days, but that's primarily based on my availability and the technician's availability.
I've seen the return on value. That's something that I'm working with my clients on, to really understand what value means from an IT perspective. And some of them are readily identifying the value.
For example, whenever there has been a need to recover a file or a server for a client, and they have called me and I have done that within the recovery time objective, they see and understand that that was a lot quicker than what they had experienced in the past.
The licensing structure was changed some time ago and it's a lot more efficient and the price points are a lot better. They're improving and heading in the right direction.
I believe it's a lot better simply because we are in a region where the clients that we have can't truly be described as small enterprises. They're more like micro-enterprises and, therefore, the price point has to be a lot more compatible or competitive for these smaller organizations, as opposed to larger organizations that can be truly described as SME's.
We looked at some others including Veeam. For us, at the time, the difference in favour of Infrascale was the effective and efficient way that complete virtual machine images would be captured and, on top of that, available for spin-up during failure.
My advice would be to really understand the cost of downtime to your business. That's the first "port of call." You've got to understand the financial cost of not being able to operate the business. That's the way I can actually put a price point on a situation where they are down for five minutes or an hour, in a very crude calculation based on how much they're paying their staff per hour. I then tell them that if their system were to go down for however long, this is how long it would take me to get it back up, saving those costs I calculated for them, as well as possible intangible losses. That's very important because it's all about the bottom dollar.
The speed of the solution’s restore functionality is a 3.5 or four out of 5. So far, we have not really had to put it under a lot of pressure. There hasn't been a situation where a good number of servers have gone down at any one point, to test the load versus performance. But when I have used it in the past, for one server for a small client, it has worked very well.
I would rate the time it takes Infrascale to deliver a boot-ready failover in a disaster recovery situation as a four out of five, because of the manual effort required to make the switch and fire up the failover system. It's not high-availability, which would be automated.
