Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Infrascale Backup & Disaste...
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (41st), Cloud Backup (26th), Disaster Recovery as a Service (8th)
VMware Aria Operations
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
360
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (2nd), Virtualization Management Tools (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

SS
Jul 10, 2021
If the physical hardware has a problem, then we can utilize this appliance, turn on the virtual machine, and carry on running the business while correcting the issue
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.
Francois Gravel - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 14, 2023
Easy to install and configure
Primarily, we use VMware Aria Operations for monitoring VMware and the cloud. We also need to report on physical servers We are not currently using the solution to the extent of what it can do. But we are moving in that direction. We are in the process of getting an integration to our ServiceNow…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery, where we have the ability to boot up VMs quickly in a disaster."
"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."
"I like that we can see what amount of the CPU has been used and what's been handed out. We can see how we can bring the virtual machines in line with what actually has been used which has saved us cost."
"It is easy to see when something has gone wrong. We just have to go in and fix it. The reduced time it takes to spot and fix an issue has improved my organization. It saves the amount of resources that we use to fix an incident"
"The solution has helped us improve quality of service to users, by giving alerts when different performance metrics get outside of their normal ranges. For example, I've had times when there have been memory leaks in applications and this solution has shown me as my memory usage gets outside of normal bounds. I'm able to find that and resolve it before my customers get back to me to tell me that there's a problem."
"The most valuable feature would be the ability to plug into the data feeds that we have and pull information from physical hardware as well as the virtual layer. The best feature is the visualization of what's going on, so we can take a very quick look and see if there are any issues that stand out."
"I like the fact that the performance is good and that it makes it easy to consolidate all your servers."
"The scalability is great. With vRealize Operations Manager, we are able to create remote collection nodes if we feel that it's too intensive for the current deployment. The remote collection nodes allow us to collect more metrics from other sources."
"The most valuable feature is all the metrics we get. They're really good. Being able to drill down and find out where the CPU and memory bottlenecks are and being able to tune them is really helpful."
"From a troubleshooting standpoint, beforehand it took us a lot of time to actually go into esxtop, pull the actual raw data that was actually happening from a storage level, a network level, a CPU/VCPU and memory level. But having all of these resources at our fingertips, from a graphical user interface, we can pinpoint the pitfall very easily"
 

Cons

"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."
"I would like to be able to limit the bandwidth in cases, for example, where we are uploading the backup."
"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 can always make the GUI a little bit nicer, the interface level a bit better. There's always room for improvement."
"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."
"There is room for improvement by making the interface a little more intuitive when navigating to recover flat files or an old server."
"I would like to see more features for the section on the viruses and maybe another in reference to two-factor authentication."
"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."
"In vCenter 6.7, there are themes. I would like to see that add to vRealize Operations as well."
"Lacks sufficient training for a relatively complex solution."
"It's a little bit scattered. I have to go through a lot of steps to get everything in one place. I would like it that if you click on one cluster, you get all the information from the host, VMs, whatever is there. Sometimes I have to go to different places to get the information."
"I'd like to see more out-of-the-box dashboards and less customizing of the environment. The interface could be more streamlined. There are still a lot of old dashboards versus the new UI dashboards."
"Some of the more advanced stuff takes a bit of time to dig into it. It takes a little longer to setup if you want really detailed stuff. They could make the learning curve smoother."
"There's a lot of stuff we want to do that we can't. I would advise someone considering this solution to take classes and get a lot of information because this solution may look simple but it's a lot harder than it seems."
"vROps is, by its nature, a very complex product."
"I would like to see them bring in metrics for other things in the infrastructure, not just the virtual infrastructure: for example, being able to bring in metrics from my arrays themselves or my fiber channel switches or my ethernet switches. Being able to collect that data would help in being able to lay a holistic view on top of how my entire system is functioning, from the hypervisor all the way down to my end-point."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing fees are billed every four months."
"Infrascale's pricing, to me, was outstanding and was one of the major factors in my decision to go with Infrascale... My customer had a different solution before and his monthly payment was three times as much as the payment he now has with Infrascale."
"Pricing of the product could be improved. It definitely makes it a harder sell. They will usually end up getting close to the price we need, but I have to go through everybody to get the price reduced. Their list pricing is significantly higher than that of other solutions."
"You get unlimited clients and buy a bucket of space. In addition to the standard fees there were setup fees."
"The appliances have different prices because of storage, size, and memory. For example, the older machines support more virtual machines, whereas the new one only supports one virtual machine. As we have purchased the later appliances, they have probably been a little bit more expensive because they have to be good enough to keep the business running if the physical server goes down. We learned our lesson from the one that went down when we tried to run products and it wasn't quick enough."
"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."
"The licensing is based on how much data you have plus what appliances you need."
"It is super competitive. It is worth taking a look at it from a licensing and pricing perspective."
"Don't overallocate! This means that you don't have to buy many hosts. You can save money that way."
"Our budgets are always tight. We would like to have more features at lower licensing levels for easier access to them."
"Bundle it in with your license rather than buying it as a separate product. It saves a lot of money that way."
"I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it."
"Cost is an issue on vROps. The Standard edition, for an organization our size, is just not useful at all. However, I like the price point of vROps Standard. But as a company, the Advanced is the minimum version that we can use, because we need the customization, we need a lot of the features that Advanced brings. But the price is substantially higher than Standard. It's always been a challenge to try to go in to my leadership and say, "Here's what I want." I've always got to go back and super-justify it and it's not an easy win. Whereas, if the pricing were closer to the Standard model, or maybe even a little bit above that, it's an easier conversation with leadership. But because it really feels like more than double the price, I'm not sure the value, double the money, is there, as an easy-sell to my leadership."
"VMware support is very costly compared to other organizations' support. When you purchase a VMware product, such as vSphere or vROps, the license is perpetual, but you also have to purchase the support service for a number of years. The support service pricing is very high compared to the license, and compared to competitive vendors."
"The solution is costly."
"The product is too expensive to implement."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Real Estate/Law Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Infrascale Platform?
The initial setup was straightforward and we received support from the manufacturer.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Infrascale Platform?
The licensing for Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery is monthly.
What needs improvement with Infrascale Platform?
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.
What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...
Is VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?
In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with assis...
What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?
For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more a...
 

Also Known As

Infrascale Platform
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager, VCOPS, vRealize Operations
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MSPs servicing small and mid-size companies VARs servicing mid-sized companies Direct SMB or mid-sized companies
Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi
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