Any Unitrends backup users?

phoeneous

Looking to move away from Backup Exec and I'm down to two choices: Unitrends or Yosemite (Barracuda). I keep hearing amazing things about Unitrends and they offer software or appliance based solution. Currently we use tape to backup 1TB raw data, sql, exchange, and two vm's.


Anyone use Unitrends or Yosemite before? Any feedback is appreciated.

dover

Phoeneous,

My work recently conducted an onsite proof of concept with two of the Unitrends appliances. Very nice. Quick, easy and we were even able to 'spin' up virtual machines on the Unitrends appliance - which was pretty slick for DR, auditing or experimenting if you are SAN capacity limited.

Also, since you are currently using tapes you probably have a requirement for off-site storage (which is where we were too). You can either replicate your Unitrends backups to a secondary site appliance OR they have a removable drive enclosure add-on where you can pull the drives and send them for off-site storage.

I have no affiliation with Unitrends. We couldn't even see the project through to completion because of budget constraints but they were top of the list for us.

Haven't tried Yosemite but we did also check out:

AppAssure (Dell acquisition) - Can run as a virtual machine or as software on top of Dell servers. This was #2 in our bake-off.
CommVault - very nice and feature rich, but too expensive for a small shop
Avamar (EMC) - eh...

I think you can download a Unitrends VM to test it out, see how it works and get a feel for day-to-day management

phoeneous

Unitrends looks good but the cost is too high for us to even get the 712 appliance. Budget is limited. I'll check out AppAssure.

dover

Realistically, for us, it was going to be AppAssure - just because of the discounts and the existing relationship with Dell.

It isn't a bad product at all. If you end up going with it, give us a detailed review. I only got to work with it for about a week.

it_consultant

Commvault has not failed me yet.

phoeneous

dover wrote: »

Realistically, for us, it was going to be AppAssure - just because of the discounts and the existing relationship with Dell.

It isn't a bad product at all. If you end up going with it, give us a detailed review. I only got to work with it for about a week.

Just did a demo and it's a great product but cost is out of our price range

linuxabuser

We have 2 of the 50TB appliances. They are phenomenal, as is their phone support. We have a relatively large budget, but if you can affort a Unitrends, do it. Sell it to management as the cost of the Unitrends vs. the cost of the data they risk using by having a BE backup fail.

alias454

We used unitrends too and other then the interface being a little bit hard to navigate it seemed pretty solid. We had 4 physical appliances and one larger unit setup offsite to do replication to.