Unitrends Reviews

Unitrends is a hardware-based solution that we use for backup and disaster recovery. We are trying it out to get it into our market to sell. 

With Unitrends we can spin up devices into a VM in about five minutes' time. The disaster recovery time is very quick. Even while we are busy fixing hardware, we still have a running machine. That minimizes the loss of service. Something that usually took two hours now takes only five minutes on the server.

The feature I find most valuable is the hardware functionality because it's reliable and it's got predictive analytics and hardware failure. The predictive analytics are great and the reporting is awesome. It is a very reliable product.

Unitrends offers a lot of services and that allows us to seed devices. What we do is to create a backup on site, write it to a disc, courier it to Unitrends and they seed it to the cloud. So you don't need to copy terabytes of data over a line. That's very handy. 

It is all very dependent on what the customer is buying. They can buy a hardware solution or a software solution. We don't particularly like working with a software solution because we don't trust underlying hardware and hypervisors and those type of things.

I will compare Unitrends to a Swiss army knife back up. It offers a lot of ways to do all sorts of things. 

If the interface could be less complex, it is would be great. It's not the easiest to get around and to work with. Someone with a technical background won't have a problem with it, but new people might struggle with the interface complexity.

I would like to see more support for the different major cloud vendors and more focus on the desktop so that I can give a client a single solution for all of their backup requirements. I don't like selling two or three different backup products to cover various needs. I want to be able to provide my client with a single solution from a single vendor.

If you do proper planning, the program is very stable. I think Unitrends is designed for a data center and servers rather than for end-user backups. 

Unitrends is very scalable. You can basically plug in a new device and add more devices as you scale.

Unitrends is not extensively being used here in South Africa but we have a lot of plans to increase usage of the product. It's being extensively used overseas, and it has already appeared in Gartner and the visionary side of their graph and it has a lot of usage in Europe and the US. We're trying to increase the market in South Africa dramatically.

The technical support is brilliant. Unitrends provides what they call a white glove service, where they monitor the devices. They will send people out to either do repairs should something go wrong, or they will send a new device out. Then it's a matter of plugging it in because they do a lot of the maintenance work themselves.

I've used many solutions throughout my career in technical support. We switched to Unitrends because it works and we have started selling Unitrends because it works. It's reliable and it's a very trustworthy system.

I used Backup Exec and other solutions before, but I have found that a lot of them can't be trusted.

We went through a long period of evaluation before choosing Unitrends as a product.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward if the planning is done well. It is very important to realize that it isn't just a plug and play thing. You must do proper planning and get your capacities right. You can't just do a lackadaisical implementation. So it is not straightforward, but it's very well sorted out by the time it goes into production. They do provide templates for the setup and essentially they give you an entire project plan. 

The time it takes to deploy the program will depend on the size of the customer. A small client's deployment will be very fast. But you have to plan first and have to look at the client's capacity, how much they're backing up and how often they're backing up. Then you can cut their RTO's and RPO's down. You must include the business planning, what their objectives are, and then fit everything within that framework. If you try to miss a few steps and wing it, the program won't work for you.

We are vendors for Unitrends. We use Unitrends themselves as part of the deployment and they're very good.

Licensing costs appear high for hardware devices and software, when compared to other solutions. But in the long run, they're not, because you get free hardware replacement after three or five years. It's not an easy comparison, but it is more cost effective in the long run than most other solutions. You don't need new licensing every year.

For hardware devices, you pay a per seat or per call licensing structure. There are no other hidden costs like you have with a lot of other products. The upfront licensing is very simple to understand.

Most of our customers use VM and Backup Exec, but because we are resellers of Unitrends, we also use it from time to time. For end-user backups, we use a product called CloudBerry, which we have yet to actually sell into the market here in South Africa. We focus mainly on the data center and server market.

My advice would be to follow the recommendation when you do the planning and installation. If you don't you're going to run into trouble. For what it's designed for, I will rate this product a nine and a half out of ten. It is pretty much the best product out there for what it claims to do. They've lived up to just about every promise they have made on marketing and on their website. 

Support for older operating systems.

A solution which can backup most operating systems to its appliance.

Linux full bare metal backups (automatic).

Eight years.

Every few years, an update may not be applied right and we may have to manually reload the software.

Every few years, an update may not be applied right and we may have to manually reload the software.

No.

An eight out of 10. They are very helpful most of the time, which is why we selected them.

An eight out of 10. They are very helpful most of the time, which is why we selected them.

rsync.

We implemented it ourselves.

The nice thing with this appliance is you do not have to worry about server licencing, and it's separate from the SAN.

Veeam.

• Easily mastered interface and application for backup/recovery.
• Versatile, works well in VM and physical environments.
• Nice VM or file-level recovery, without spinning anything up to accommodate.

Fast and reliable. Able to integrate two sites and backup environments over an extended campus WAN.

Implement the changes that are being requested through the GUI.

Seven years.

Mostly networking, not the appliance or implementation specialists fault.

Having issues backing up systems with tons of small files.

Yes, expansion is only possible by buying a new appliance.

Good.

Very good technical support.

Yes, switched companies and the requirements changed drastically.

Very straightforward.

Mostly in-house with some vendor assistance.

Good.

No advice. The pricing is fairly competitive.

Yes, Veeam and others.

No, we are happy with second gen of the appliance that we have purchased.

This is my primary backup and archive service.

It is an easy system to use. The support, if needed, is always willing to help.

It is a quick and easy way to organize my backups and to keep track of them.

So far, I have not had any issues and support has always been helpful.

The ability to diversify jobs within the same server helps break down a large chunk of data into more manageable and concentrated chunks.

The next release should bring back the ease of some search issues from the legacy program.  

The ability to run just differentials without pulling the full on your archive.

No issues.

No issues.

This is our second system with Unitrends.

Talk with the sales guys. They can work with you on the best package.

Not this time around.

We use it to back up files and virtual machine (VM) instances.

It works as expected the vast majority of the time. This is an improvement over other products that seem to break with the slightest change in the environment.

The simple and fast restore routine.

There are a few quirks where the GUI, agent, and back-end are not precisely meshed. The new OS may have fixed those issues, however.

No issues.

No issues.

Excellent.

We used software-only products. There were a number of incidents where the compatibility with the hardware was not a 100 percent. 

This solution alleviates the compatibility issue.

It was probably as simple as could be considering that every environment will need some amount of tweaking.

It was implemented in-house.

Not calculated. Estimated at about one year.

Initial pricing is competitive. Renewal pricing is steep, so make sure to project costs for the lifetime of the appliance(s). 

None worth mentioning here.

It has removed the need to have a copy for backup replication purposes, as we replicate our backups to the cloud.

The ability to backup both physical and virtual machines, along with having an appliance store the backups locally instead of on a file server, NAS, or SAN.

Technical support is quite inadequate. Techs don't see to be well-versed in troubleshooting issues that arise and tickets stay opened for weeks for resolution.

Restoration has been unstable when needed. Some backups don't restore properly or take an excessive amount of time to complete.

We have not needed to scale, so this is not applicable.

I give them a one out of 10.

It was supposed to straightforward, but ended up being complex due to unforeseen issues by Unitrends support.

Carefully observe reviews on this solution by actual end users before considering this as a backup strategy.

We use it to back up our VMware environments. We do daily backups of virtual servers and databases.

It has reduced recovery time. From recovering VMs to just simple file-level recovery. It's all fast and easy.

The daily backup report is one of the most valuable features. There is a clear report sent and emailed to me every morning that shows if all backups were successful.

The only area that I would say needs some improvements is the initial setup. A little more assistance and help during implementation would be great.