The recovery of data is the most valuable feature. The software backup, which is just a program that gets installed on a server, can back up to the cloud. You can install that on a server or PC, and that will simply back up a user's files and folders. If it is installed on the server, we just back up the relevant data. Recovering that, if there has been a malicious attack on a business or anything like that, has been invaluable in the past. The good features about that are obviously, if the physical hardware has a problem, then we can utilize the appliance, turn on the virtual machine, and carry on running the business while we put the hardware back and correct the issue.

The Boot Verification feature gives you a snapshot picture to tell you what would happen if a virtual machine was booted. From that, you can tell whether the backup was successful. 

I find the dashboard fairly straightforward. It is fairly in-depth from day one. The more you use it, the more you get used to it. I find it fairly straightforward now for making some limited changes that won't really cause any problems. It has a good user interface.

The speed of the solution’s restore functionality is very quick. It works a treat and does the job perfectly. I don't think we have ever come to the point of thinking the product isn't quick.

Among the most valuable features are

• regular backup 
• individual file restores
• disaster recovery, with the ability to spin up a VM within a short period of time.

It is also very important to our clients that Infrascale's Critical Server Insurance feature protects physical and virtual servers, including Windows, Linux, VMware, and Hyper-V. It's part of the total solution they offer that covers every server infrastructure you can imagine. They all get backed up into a virtual environment, which is fantastic. It's totally hardware-independent.

Similarly, the fact that that feature allows you to spin up locally or in the cloud, on demand, without declaration or extra fees is key. If I have a physical server go down locally, I can instantly put up this machine on-prem and it would replace the broken machine within a couple of minutes.

The Infrascale Dashboard is very easy to understand, has a good overview, and gives me access to all my appliances without having to have a local VPN connection to the individual clients. It makes it very easy to find my way around.

In addition, the backup and restore speeds are outstanding. The algorithm they use to migrate their data back and forth between the cloud and local appliances is great. Generally, it takes hardly any time to get a file restored to the original place on the server.

The most valuable feature is disaster recovery, where we have the ability to boot up VMs quickly in a disaster. It gives us the option to have the on-premises and cloud appliances boot up if anything ever happens to one of our on-premises servers. 

Reliability has been key. Their previous backup solution was shaky, at best, making the reliability huge now.

The availability or restore time is also huge because if certain systems are down for any length of time, our client is losing significant amounts of money. That means recovery time is also key.

For this particular client, the solution’s Critical Server Insurance feature that protects physical and virtual servers including Windows, Linux, VMware, and Hyper-V, was a very big factor as well. They have a bunch of physical servers, as well as virtual. The mix is predominantly virtual. They also have some NAS boxes that we back up using Infrascale.

And the Critical Server Insurance feature allows you to spin up locally or in the cloud, on-demand, without declaration or extra fees, has saved their bacon at least once so far. It's definitely very critical. That was one of the selling points, the fact that they could spin it up without additional fees or additional drama, and that it could happen very quickly.

In addition, the speed of the backup functionality is great. The speed of the restore is even better. It's almost instantaneous if you're booting off of their devices. If you're copying the files to another location, the only limit is the bandwidth.

The unlimited disaster recovery and failover testing with no declaration also played into the thought process, but they were not as critical to our client as knowing that their stuff is going to be available when they need it available.

• Ease of use
• Ease of deployment
• Overall flexibility with the entire architecture.

The overall ease of use and management of the solution using the Infrascale Dashboard is very good. We haven't had any issues. It is easy to learn. Most of our techs who deal with backups are usually up and running with the dashboard within a day or so. They don't have a lot of buried features where you have to dig through things to get to the resolution. It is pretty self-explanatory.

The number one critical thing for us is the solution’s Critical Server Insurance feature protects physical and virtual servers including Windows, Linux, VMware, and Hyper-V. All our deployments, from an MSP perspective, use those architectures. Therefore, we need to be able to protect them and back them up.

The solution’s Critical Server Insurance feature allows us to spin up locally or in the cloud, on-demand, without a declaration or extra fee. This is a very critical component because it allows us:

• To test. 
• When we need to do one-off things potentially for clients, we can spin it up in their environment, do specific tests, and then determine if we want to deploy or not. 
• It allows us to go back in time if the client needs to see something old, where they were having an issue, and determine, "Yes, this was an issue back then," or "No, this is something new that we are dealing with at this moment in time."

The most valuable thing is that it backs up to the cloud, which is good. I've used it to actually restore server crashes. It works for what it's supposed to do. There are no shocks or surprises. It works. It does what it's supposed to. It's perfect.

I just use it as a purely cloud backup, six times a day. It runs every four hours. That's all I use it for. Does it work as a disaster recovery? Yes, in a sense it does. It won't bring back your server because I don't pay for that portion. But it will keep my data safe. So, I always know that in the worst-case scenario, I'll be out four hours of data in that bit, which has worked for me in the past. I've used it. I've restored companies back in an hour, where I've needed just databases and they work. That part is great. 

The overall ease of use and ease of management of the solution using the Infrascale dashboard is excellent. I'd rate it 10 out of 10 because the dashboard is very simple to use. For someone with a technical background, it's a wonderful piece of software to be using in a cloud environment. But if you're not technical, then it might be a problem. It could be confusing for non-technical people. If you don't know what you're doing, you could kind of screw it up.

Any human with two brain cells can do it. It's like anything else. So, once you train a human, they're good. Anybody can do it. Anybody with a competent brain can use it and go with a little bit of technical skill. It might be confusing in the beginning, but once you're trained up and you've used it a little bit, like anything else in your life, it'll be easy. They'll come as normal.

The fire-and-forget aspect is the most valuable part, and it sends me reports when I key them up. I also like the portal when I need to dig into it. It's all web-based, so when I'm working from home I can just log in and poke away on it.

Its Critical Server Insurance feature for protecting physical and virtual servers, including Windows, Linux, VMware, and Hyper-V is mandatory for me and it makes me happy. If I had a backup solution that didn't do that, it would not be a backup solution and would not be any good. For example, if something is just backing up Word documents and putting them somewhere, I can get a million products that do that, and half of them are free. But if I'm going to pay for a service, it's got to be automated. It's got to be able to hit all my infrastructure and back up everything I need backed up. If it can't do all that, then I've got no interest in it.

When it comes to the ease of management of Infrascale using the Infrascale Dashboard, it's pretty slick. You smash buttons and check the stuff you want to back up and you pick your deployment. Smash more buttons and it happens.

The speed of Infrascale's backup functionality is fine. I don't notice it running and it doesn't impact the performance of my machines.

The most valuable feature is the ability to boot locally, as well as in Infrascale's cloud. This means that we can either do on-site failover or failover to their cloud.

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.

The best part is the possibility to spill over the lock-ups to the cloud and the spin-up part. I can use several from the cloud. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is simple to use.