We did have a major problem last year in March. Somebody attacked some servers being supported by Infrascale and managed to wipe the servers as well as wiping the appliance. However, they didn't manage to wipe the cloud. So, what was on the cloud had to be downloaded to the appliance again. The customer was probably down for about three days. This was a very difficult situation for us to be in.

I think somebody had accessed the server, could get onto the appliance, and see what it was because we had saved the password. Now, I know better than to save the password. Also, the password was still the default password. With the new implementation, it makes you change the password so you can't keep the default password. However, four years ago, when we implemented it, the default password was still on that appliance when that appliance got wiped by somebody.

While this would be a very worst-case scenario, I don't blame Infrascale for the amount of time that it took. However, it was difficult for us because we were trying to placate our customer, which was difficult, because they have a 25 million pound turnover business. They were not happy, but we are still working with them. 

I think I'd be more confident now dealing with the problem. Plus, we monitor the systems more closely. Whereas, previously, I presumed that everything was going well without really checking. Now, I have learned that I need to be on top of any issues. So, I am checking the appliances and cloud solution backups daily. So, we are a bit better switched on with supporting it.

When you are ordering hardware appliances, they have to be delivered from America. In the past, hard drives on the appliance have been simple SSD drives that are installed. However, they don't have a local supply for the SSD drives in the UK. They have to be exported from the US, arrive, and then I have to go and install them. Then, they will rebuild it from their side of things. However, I could order that same SSD drive online and get it the next day. So, I have to wait days for things to come when I could get the exact same drive the next day in the UK, if I wanted to. That causes a bit of a problem. I don't know how many businesses they have in the UK, but I do think that having to import stuff from the US is a time-consuming problem. If there was a holding in the UK, then we wouldn't have that delay in time.

When they export stuff to me from the US, invariably the delivery company (called DHL) is looking for EORI numbers that we don't have. So, they try to involve us in the export of it, and it has nothing at all to do with us. We are simply the customer. If I had to moan about anything, that would be it.

Where the dashboard is concerned, I am okay with it. I am looking at one now and understand what I am looking at. When you first get in it is difficult, but I do believe that they now offer certain training for it. Given the fact that we are trying to support our customers in the UK, it is good to have the knowledge about it, know what you are looking at, see what the size of the protected bytes are, and understand it a little bit better. I have been doing IT support for implementations for the best part of 30 years, and it took me a bit of time to get my head around some of the way things are done.

The only thing I would suggest, and I have talked to my manager about it already, is that they should have a direct backup-to-cloud solution. It should be something that does not require me to do an image backup, and then individual file and folder backups, to be able to restore individual files.

The pricing model that they recently changed to is a little bit complicated, and the biggest area for improvement is a better way of figuring out how to price it. It would really simplify it for us if the pricing model were put back to the way it used to be.

The centralized dashboard could use a little help. It's not bad, but it has some room for improvement. For this client, we have two units and they roll up into the centralized dashboard, but that dashboard doesn't do enough for us. We always have to end up going to each individual device to do whatever needs doing.

One of the significant drawbacks of it is due to the fact that we're using two devices to manage the same vCenter, or virtualization environment, and they don't talk to each other. That means I can't easily see what VMs are already being protected. If I'm on Infrascale device "A" and I have protected these VMs, when I go over to device "B," I can't see that those VMs are already covered. They could be backing up the same things and I wouldn't know it until I go in there and physically look and compare. I have to flip flop between them or come up with a spreadsheet.

That is huge for me, as an area for improvement.

There could be some room for improvement in the on-premises hardware selection. It is hard for them to deploy a lot of different hardware options. Depending on footprint size and overall capabilities, that is where there could be some flexibility in some cases. However, it is not a deal-breaker.

I can't really think of anything that really needs to be improved from my perspective, because I only use the backup. Maybe someone who is using something else might have a different opinion on that. But for the online backup and recovery tool, I'm not going to say there's anything that needs improvement. They can always improve stuff. But from the top of my head, I can't think of anything. It does what it needs to do. That's it. It doesn't need to do anything more than what it does and nothing less than what it's doing.

The Infrascale dashboard when it comes to centralized deployment and configuration is excellent. I have no problems with the solution. They could always make it better. They can always make the GUI a little bit nicer, the interface level a bit better. There's always room for improvement, but there's nothing on the top of my head that's saying, "Hey, this is what needs to be fixed." But, the programmers are probably working on their own things. So, there's always room for improvement.

They set me up as a vendor, not as a client. So sometimes I end up in the wrong portal and I'm doing vendor things instead of client things, and I didn't realize that right away. Once I figured it out I just changed my favorites on my desktop to go to the client-side. It confused me for about three days, when I was setting it up and deploying it.

We would like to see more of the hardware appliances using solid-state drives versus mechanical drives so that the speed of backups and speed of restoration is faster. I know that that actually is an option that they are rolling out on some models, so they have started implementing that.

Having greater options for the geographic diversity of the data would be a good feature. Right now, we're just replicating to a single data center. But if that data could then be replicated to a second data center, that would be a value add. It provides a little bit more security because they have, in the past, had data center issues. When this happens, the offsite backups are just taken down. Having options to replicate between their data centers, once the data is offsite, would be an improvement that they could make.

One feature that would be really nice, would be to have the file and folder backup agent that is on-premises able to back up to their Infrascale cloud. As it is now, there are two different steps. Adding this capability would give us one solution to manage all of the different services. For example, having the DRaaS appliance be the central means of managing would be really valuable. As it is now, they have the cloud backup product with its own software agent and its own UI, in addition to the DRaaS appliance. Merging them into one platform would be preferable.

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.

I think they could increase security. I would like to see more features for the section on the viruses and maybe another in reference to two-factor authentication.

I would like to be able to limit the bandwidth in cases, for example, where we are uploading the backup. I may want to set it to a maximum of 128kb in the application itself.

I would also like to be able to move from one licensed product to another, and not have to purchase a new license if we want to use additional features. For example, if I wanted to move to the virtual appliance backup and the DR sites, it should be not a new product, but rather something that I can upgrade to and only pay an upgrade fee.

A version for Linux would be an improvement, as we have some users with CentOS and Ubuntu for which we cannot do backups.