BDRSuite Backup & Replication Reviews

Vembu has been a great solution for my smaller clients who don’t need a lot of storage. The entry price is excellent for small businesses who want to use cloud backups.

I have 8 clients currently using Vembu Cloud BDR.

Moving to cloud backups eliminated the need for clients to change USB drives or worry about drives being stored offsite.

I can restore through the Vembu client or pull the file from anywhere via the browser. So far, it has been adequate in meeting my clients' needs.

There are a lot of cloud backup solutions that can handle documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and pictures, but they are more limited for those who need cloud backups for applications like SQL. 

I have had issues with new client registrations. There are frequent connectivity issues to the cloud servers. Multiple times, I have had to prove to support that it wasn’t a problem on my end. It always works out in the end, but it is troubling to have the same issues repeated across different clients. Issues eventually get escalated to the cloud team and are mysteriously resolved with no changes on my end. I don’t know if it is an AWS issue, capacity issue, or something else. However, it is concerning for clients when they get several failure notices for their backups, though through retrying the job was eventually successful.

It can still mature in some ways. The agent interface can be improved and the portal could be more informative.

I have been using Vembu Cloud BDR with clients since 2019.

I have had no issues doing restores. Throughput on restored data is an issue for some other cloud backup solutions. However, I have never had an issue with Vembu Cloud BDR.

We have always gotten to a solution eventually. Sometimes, it takes some time though. 

I had an issue that had to be escalated to the cloud team that was only available 9 to 5 local India time. Having to stay up for a support call at 2 AM (my time) was frustrating. I had to pursue it to prove a new client registration issue was not a problem on my end. Not being believed by support and having to go to that extreme should not have been necessary. I was correct in the end, as they eventually found an issue on the Vembu client provisioning side. I think the whole situation could have been handled better.

Most of my issues were resolved, but there is rarely anything on my end that needs to be fixed. Most resolutions say something like, “We detected a problem on our servers and took steps to resolve the issue.” Then, things start working again. While we get a resolution, I don’t have much visibility into what was done. Since we generally get there eventually, I will rate the technical support as seven out of 10.

Neutral

Mozy used to be the major player in this market space. Mozy’s demise, with its purchase by Carbonite, left a void for a solution that could handle SQL cloud backups and meet small business needs. Vembu Cloud BDR has been filling this void for my small clients for a few years now.

I have clients that have used many solutions. For those who switched to Vembu Cloud BDR, most are coming from Carbonite (originally Mozy) or Backup Exec with local storage.

It is straightforward when it works. I have had issues a couple times with new client registrations.

Deployment takes less than an hour.

My implementation strategy is to register the cloud account, install the client agent, configure the jobs, and then run.

I deploy and maintain the solution.

Backups are like an insurance policy. You pay for the protection and hope you don’t need it. You don’t really expect a return, just security if needed.

The pricing is good. The tough part is estimating storage needs.

We used to be able to license regular PCs at no cost. We just paid for storage. The recent addition of the workstation license has changed that. For clients who use Vembu Cloud BDR for backup of remote user laptops, they now have licenses that they need to buy in addition to their server license.

The solution has excellent affordability for businesses with tight budgets.

I checked up on just about every cloud backup solution that I could find. This solution provides SQL application backups with a good entry point for small businesses.

It is a good value. While there have been some issues, that happens with any solution. Vembu Cloud BDR is a good entry product for small clients and can also scale to larger environments. I have not seen anything that diminishes its value.

Restore speed has been fine. Luckily, I have not had to do a complete restore, only occasional files or an SQL database.

Most clients were using local USB drives for backup storage prior to moving to Vembu Cloud BDR. Speed of restores was not an issue coming from a local source. The only clients who have seen an increase were those that previously were using another cloud backup provider that has notoriously slow restore throughput.

I will increase usage as client needs dictate.

I would rate it as eight out of 10. 

We use it primarily for backups and restoration of data, for disaster recovery purposes. We back up our file servers as well as our access control servers. We use it for standard, physical Windows 2016 servers, at this stage.

The key things we use in this solution thus far are only the backup portion, the recovery, and the reports. We will try to make use of it more extensively, but for now it's working for us.

It's on-prem at this stage, but we would love at a later stage to go to the cloud.

• The dashboard is very nice. 
• The solution is very user-friendly. 

When you're looking at your dashboard, you can see all your active jobs. You can see exactly if they're successful or failed and you can actually drill down and see what caused the problem. The fact you can see that right away is nice. 

It's a very simple layout, but effective. What you see is what you get. Some dashboards have these funny graphs and a lot of information. But what I want to know is, number-one, what jobs are running? What type of jobs are running? And I want to know what the job status is. If it's a red "X" I know I have to investigate. If it's a green checkmark then I know I don't have to stress about it, it has actually backed up what I've selected. It's simple. That's what you want.

What I would love to see on the dashboard are graphs, per backup  job. I want to see the month and the days in it. It doesn't matter what type of graph, but it must just give you more information. Currently it's in text format and you have to click on it and investigate. It would be nice if I could see information in a small chart as well. If a job has failed, when did it actually fail and what percentage of it failed? Did it fail completely, 75 percent or 100 percent or did it only fail partially?

Then we would know we have to look at settings, or maybe there's a permission issue, or maybe the unit was offline. Currently it's just showing a red "X" and you have to go in to have a look. If it gave you some information such as "100 percent complete, successful," and not just a checkmark, and if it failed it would tell you, "75 percent successful," then you would know more.

We've only been using the product for three months, and only on three servers.

It's very stable, unless you have somebody messing around. Otherwise, it should not have any issues.

It's scalable. It's similar to industry standard backup and disaster recovery solutions, like Veeam. 

We want to move to the cloud at a later stage, and we also want to do backups of Office 365. We're in the process of moving from webmail to Office 365. Once we're there, we're going to use the same platform to make backups of critical user data and mailboxes.

Although Office 365 has retention and backup solutions in place, we prefer to use Vembu in addition, on top of that, for our high-level users, to be 100 percent sure. Microsoft can maybe give you 30 or 60 days of retention, but if you have your own backups, you can go back to one year, based on the typical needs of users.

Once we have our Office 365 portion up and running and maybe one or two email users, I would love to perform a backup online. The challenge we have is that our upload is a bit slow. We might need to use a satellite link, but within the next month or two we should have a solution and the internet should not be a problem. Then we can most probably run some of these backups from the cloud version. The idea is to ultimately move to the cloud.

Currently, the information we back up is for about 60 to 80 active users, across all the employees in the company.

The salespeople I've dealt with are fantastic; they are great people. They wanted the solution to work and they only stopped phoning me the moment I told them, "Listen, I'm alright. I'm okay now." They wanted to make sure that the application was working and meeting our needs. That was very nice.

And obviously, you can contact them anytime and they will help you. Their technical support is great. It's top-notch. The turnaround time is quick. The last time I contacted the person I have always dealt with, within a couple of hours he contacted me. It's not like it's 24 hours or 48 hours, it's less than that. It is good.

It's a very nice, easy, and economical solution. I'm coming from a Veeam background, but Veeam is a bit expensive. That's why we opted for Vembu. I tested out the Vembu trial version and found that it has a lovely interface, it's easy to work with, and it's something I can teach quickly. With Veeam, you must attend courses to understand it; you can't just show somebody. If I'm on leave, or I'm leaving the company, I can give anybody in my position a quick rundown.

The company I'm supporting now is not a corporate company or a listed company. The company I used to work for was a listed company and they were forced by the auditors to use a certain type of backup solution but it was expensive. When I started with this smaller company, they didn't have any backups. If something happened they would lose all their information. I was browsing the web looking for an economical but effective solution to meet the needs of this organization. I was surprised, as I had never heard about Vembu. But I checked them out and that's where the journey started with Vembu.

It's cost-effective for us.

The initial setup is straightforward. And what was nice was that I had somebody on the line to talk me through it, just to make sure. You're allowed to play around with it to get more familiar with it. Coming from a Veeam background I tried not to compare it with that. I had to work with it to make 100 percent sure that I appreciated Vembu.

I figured out most of the things by myself because it's straightforward. It's very easy if you have some form of IT or backup background. It should not be a challenge or an issue. Maybe if you're brand new to computers it could be a challenge but if you have some experience with running backups it's easy to work with.

The deployment was done within two days because we don't have a big setup. It was just me involved in the setup, from our side, and for maintenance I have an IT assistant. If I'm not there, he can handle it as well.

My experience working with the Vembu person during the setup was good. They are very proud of the product. They want it to work.

It's still too early for us to see ROI. 

But the annual cost is so low that it's going to be difficult to calculate a return on investment. But if we are going to do backups of Office 365 and those types of things, the business might see ROI, because then you're working with a lot of user information as well, and they can see the reports.

It's more affordable than Veeam, so smaller companies can afford to have a solution like this in place, which is very nice.

For three licenses we pay not even 3,000 Rand per annum, which is a bargain with what you're getting. It's not expensive if you compare it with the counterpart.

I didn't evaluate any other options other than testing Veeam for a month. I know that product and it's fantastic, but when it came to going from trial version to live version, it was a bit expensive. I went for Vembu because I could pay a third of the price and get the same service.

When I look at a product like this there are a couple of basic things it must do: 

• I must be able to access it easily, deploy it easily
• It must be secure. 
• If I want to make changes, updates must be easy as well. 
• It must be integratable, compatible with different operating systems. 

Vembu ticked all the boxes.

Do you know when a business starts to appreciate a backup solution? When it loses information and needs to recover it. If your senior management is not very risk-minded or they tend to see these things as a waste of money, the moment they lose information and you can restore it within no time, they start to respect the product and they are more than willing, when you go to them for upgrades or improvements, to actually pay for them because they know you're adding value to the business. It's not just an expense.

For a small company like ours, I would rate Vembu at eight out of 10, because while the dashboard is very nice, there are some things that the major backup solutions provide as a stock-standard, like the graphing information. Most backup solutions offer it standard. I also give it eight out of 10 because I want them to improve, but it would be nice to move closer to 10. It may take them a while to get there, but with Vembu I can sleep. I don't have to worry and that's good.

We use it purely for Hyper-V backup. It's used to protect our entire server estate.

Our previous backup solution was cloud-based rather than being on-premise, and quite often our backups could lag three or four days behind. We are now looking at having a restore point as low as 30 minutes, where the backup has never been more than an hour behind the live solution.

We use it to back up Hyper-V, and the key benefit of that is purely one of data security and dependability.

The most important features are the backup and the availability of the Universal Explorer.

The in-transit compression is great.

The deduplication could be better. It doesn't give the level of deduplication that I would get with a product that's stored in a more standard file format. I would prefer to be able to use a non-deduplicated store on a third-party deduplicated medium. But as far as the compression and the general structure go, I have no problems with them at all.

Having some flexibility for the backup to be stored in a non-deduplicated fashion so that we could store it on more high-efficiency storage would be helpful; either that or improvement to the data deduplication. The amount of storage it requires for the backup store is excessive, compared to other solutions.

It is absolutely stable. We've had no issues. It's never missed a backup and we've had no issues with data stores, even when we had an issue with the hardware which one of the data stores was on. That was very quickly recoverable and we didn't miss a backup. We've not missed a backup since installing it a year-and-a-half ago.

We're a very small business. We've only got two Hyper-V hosts that it's covering. I imagine the scalability is probably quite good, but I have no other comment on it.

Technical support is fantastic. Responses are normally received within about an hour to an hour-and-a-half. Where something has required escalation, it's been completed within a few hours. We've had very little contact with support, but where we've needed it the response has pretty much been a fix the first time.

We used Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, backing up to Azure cloud and we switched for two reasons: 

1. Vembu is less expensive.
2. It gave us more control as to where we keep that data.

The initial setup was absolutely straightforward. We had an issue, but that was caused by a problem in our Hyper-V environment, rather than Vembu itself. That was dealt with within a couple of days by Vembu support.

The deployment took about three days. It was really fast.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we were moving from Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager to Vembu. We are quite a small business so we only have two Hyper-V hosts to configure. The strategy was to install, test, and then remove the Microsoft product. It was a very straightforward plan, a very straightforward strategy. And the aim in doing so was to enable a more rapid recovery time.

We did most of the work ourselves. We didn't use a reseller at all, it was so easy to deploy.

It's only saving us about £2,000 to £3,000 a year. But in our IT, that is a help. Our IT budget is only about £250,000 a year so it's saving us one to two percent of our IT budget.

Regarding return on investment, the value of a backup system comes up when you actually need to restore it, so up until the point of restoration a backup system is purely a cost on your P&L, rather than being of any asset value. We've not had the requirement to restore, so the only cost-benefit we've had is in the cost savings over our previous solution.

The pricing and licensing structure are spot on. I don't think there's anything out there in the market that does either the licensing structure or the pricing structure better.

We evaluated Veeam but we selected Vembu because the feature set was what we needed. We didn't need to use Veeam's full recovery, full replication suite. Because of that, our costs are about a quarter of what they would have been with Veeam.

Go ahead and give it a try. It's worth the evaluation and certainly, with the restore options and the Universal Explorer option, it's competitive with things like Trilead and Veeam in terms of backup. Personally, I don't think it's as good as Veeam if you are looking at replication and high-availability but, other than that, for straight backup, I don't think there's anything in the market that's better.

There are only six of us in our IT department who use it. Nobody else has any real comments on it. It's something that sits there and does its job, and does it well. In terms of deployment and maintenance, two of us are responsible for ensuring the backup is operational and maintained.

It's used to protect our entire server estate. It's not a very big server estate, but it is the entire estate. There are no plans to extend its usage. There's nothing to extend it to.

I would give Vembu a ten out of ten. I've evaluated other products. I don't think anybody else has any advantage, certainly in terms of backup, over what Vembu provides. If I were to mark it down to a nine, it would just be for the lack of flexibility on the backup storage option.

We use it for backup and replication. 

We use it to maintain critical data and save it. It suits our needs, is versatile, and the functionality is there.

• It is easy to use.
• It is simple to deploy and maintain.

Vembu is presented more like a multi-platform tool, where you have paper features, VMware, and Hyper-V. I would like to have a different set of products instead of having a single software which does everything. This could be beneficial. 

Nowadays, I don't know of a lot of people who are using tapes anymore. If you are using tapes, you don't do backup to the cloud, for instance. Therefore, maybe have a legacy version, then a cloud plus application version.

It is not a well-known software. People do not know about Vembu.

This is not a high-end product.

There were only two issues, which were minor, and the support was very fast. This is probably the top reason why we chose Vembu. They have a very good support team who are responsive. I like the way they handle their clients compared to big vendors on the market, like Veritas, formerly Symantec.

The two issues were fixed in a relatively short time. One was fixed within the same day, and the other one was fixed within  a couple days. These are the only two issues that we had for the whole year.

We haven't had a chance to experience scalability.

I would give tech support a score of nine out of ten, which is almost perfect for me.

We were relying on Microsoft Backups, which are just basic backups. We were trying to find something simple to use and easy to deploy, and that is why did proof of concept with three different products. The short list came down to Vembu. 

Currently, we are using mass technology, so we store from mass seamlessly. Then, we use the replication feature from VMware to remote that. So, we do double backup. Local backup and remote backup plus replication, which is very accessory resilient.

The initial setup was pretty simple. The backup solution was running within two to three hours. We were maybe missing some technical help during the installation, but there were a couple of technicians who helped me during the setup and finalizing it. 

Overall, the setup is straightforward. When you choose the VM options, it is even faster.

We consolidated our infrastructure. We went from about 40 to 15 servers.

The licencing and pricing are good; it's a no-brainer. It is affordable. It has value with respect to the features included in the software.

There is a drawback in the whole approach about how the licenses are managed. There are two consoles: cloud and on-premise. It seems that on a daily basis we have to manage both consoles, which isn't user-friendly. Ideally, it should be either a single on-premise console or only a cloud console. A single platform approach is the better solution. For now, with full licensing, you have to manage your instances on the Vembu Portal, then reassign licenses, and go back to your on-premise management console to do the real management. It is a bit awkward.

I do remember that the pricing was based on a VMware or Hyper-V license, whereas on our end, it should be regarded as a VM-based license. I don't know why they make a difference at the Vembu level. We are currently on VMware migrating to Hyper-V, and we didn't want to buy licenses for VMware, but still have to buy them for Hyper-V. This the only thing which does not seem fully adequate. 

We previously used Microsoft Backup, which is not reliable.

I have a lot of experience with Symantec Backup solutions, now Veritas. Compared to Veritas, Vembu is more corporate-oriented and the support is better on Vembu's side rather than Veritas.

We also tested Naviko, Veeam, and Unitrends.

Go ahead and use it.

We use BDRSuite to back up our customers' VMs. We are a service provider, and each of our customers has different requirements. We host VMs based on the customer's environment. If the customer doesn't want a VM backup, we'll use the Citrix ADM. They will back up their own applications, and we'll send a new VM to them in the event of a disaster. 

We only use BDRSuite to back up two VMs in our current environment. It helps us with maintenance, monitoring, etc. We are satisfied with BDRSuite so far and plan to add a few more VMs in the future, including Citrix VMs and XenServer. 

We have many VMs in the old Citrix Foundry that have been running for a long time. The migration process is time-consuming and costly. VMware only supports VMware and Hyper-V but not Citrix. 

It's easy to add or remove backup jobs using BDRSuite. The solution has multiple options for backing up our customers' data. We require eight days of historical data, and our clients need incremental backups weekly, so we have one weekly backup and one daily. The backup will play each week, and they'll have a fresh running daily backup of seven days. 

We still haven't done a restoration in production, but we did a test restore, and it worked. The restoration took about four to six hours for one terabyte because we backed it up to a remote location. 

BDRSuite could improve support for XenApp Citrix Backup.

I have used BDRSuite for more than six months.

BDRSuite is stable. We're confident in the product. 

We haven't tried to scale BDRSuite, but it's scalable. 

I rate the support a nine out of tn. I'm satisfied with their support. They always respond within the window we agreed to in our support contract.

Positive

Before BDRSuite, we mainly used a Citrix XenServer Host for around 20 Citrix VMs. We adopted BDRSuite because there was no automated backup mechanism. We needed a third-party solution, and there was a lot of overhead for hardware. Our customer needed backups for two SAP VMs. We got the hardware, VMware, and whatever they need to design a full VMware backup solution. 

BDRSuite is easy to deploy and integrate with existing infrastructure. You can complete the deployment in less than a day. After the deployment, you need to install regular updates. Vembu puts out updates frequently. 

BDRSuite is cost-effective depending on your requirements and the other options available in your market. 

BDRSuite is a good option if you have a tight budget. It gives good value.

I rate BDRSuite an eight out of ten. 

We are using it for the backup of our VMs and restoration activity. We are deploying some new technologies for which we would be able to use the features of Vembu.

It has been very helpful for data backup and restoration and license management. License management and everything else works smoothly, which is very useful for us.

Its restores are nice and reliable. They are fast and smooth. As compared to other tools, they are 80% faster. The speed of the restores also depends on my network. We have less than 10 gigs of speed.

It provides multiple options to recover data during hardware failures or accidental deletion of files. They have many options to restore the data. We tested them during the DR last December. Having multiple ways to restore the service and data is very useful.

Its download VM feature is useful in migrating physical machines to our VMware environment. There were no challenges in doing that through the GUI. It was user-friendly.

The ability to map a drive and restore a separate file is most valuable. The restoration activity is good.

The data integrity check features are useful during the restoration activity. At the time of restoration, we are also checking the DR plan.

We haven't yet checked its compatibility with the new technologies in the market, such as Nutanix. It would be good if any new technology can also accommodate Vembu.

They need to improve their marketing because not many people are aware of it. People ask me what is Vembu, and I have to explain to them it is a good tool for backup and other things. 

I have been using this solution for more than three years.

Its stability is good. Its reliability is good when we have VMware and Linux VMs. It works smoothly.

Its scalability is dependent on the number of licenses that you purchase. Currently, we have 10 to 15 engineers and project managers who use this solution.

It is being used extensively. We are using only Vembu for the backup part. So, our core data depends on this solution. We have around 20 VMs, and we are taking backups of almost 100 GB of file server data. We might increase its usage in the future. Some of the people approached us to go for a new tool, but I explained to them the features that it offers. We don't have any plans to move to another solution.

Vembu team is giving excellent support to us. They provide 24/7 support. We can reach out to them at any point in time. They are able to address and give proper support for our queries. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

My organization was using another solution previously. I have used Symantec backup and other tools in my previous organization. All these tools are more or less the same.

It was already installed when I joined this organization.

We have seen an ROI in terms of reliability. When we invest in a backup solution for infrastructure backup, it should work at critical times. With Vembu, I am able to restore data quickly without any issues.

Its price is reasonable as compared to other solutions. There are no additional costs.

While increasing the count on the server-side, we have to take care of managing or optimizing the license.

We have not used Vembu's instant boot VM feature for instant access to our VMs or physical machines after a crash. We have also not used Vembu for the backup for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or AWS.

I would rate Vembu BDR Suite a 10 out of 10. It is a good tool for backup, replication, and restoration. Everything is good in this solution.

Currently, we use Vembu for weekly backups of our virtual infrastructure and monthly backups for separate, confidential data.

We use it only with VMware.

If our country is hit by a meteor, I have secured data in another country on the other side of the world. Then, I can start the restore process immediately with this solution.

There is an option to back up a specific folder from a specific source, not the whole virtual machine. 

The encryption is a must in these days. You can't do anything without encryption of your traffic or data.

The compression is unusable in every scenario because the data that we backup is too different, according to each type. Therefore, the compression is not applicable everywhere. So, we don't use the compression at all.

They can work on their cloud solution. In these days, the data becomes too much and you have to back up a lot of data to the site. They could offer cheaper storage to their clients with the cloud, making this a single source of truth solution. In our project, we are using two service providers: One who offers our storage and another who offers the software. If they work on their cloud solution and can offer their clients lower prices for this type of storage, this would be a really good improvement.

It's pretty stable. We haven't had any issues with the software, like crashing or freezing.

I don't have any of the reservations about the scalability because we currently use it on a single machine. 

We have about three users who are part of the IT department, including two senior administrators and me, as IT manager.

Our account manager has provided us with great information and support. He is always on time. I haven't needed to wait more than two hours to read the answers to my questions.

Three years ago, we started the project to duplicate our infrastructure in every single aspect and needed to create daily backups of our virtual machines.

We picked Vembu two years ago, but switched to another solution which comes with integrated backup for virtual machines. This year, we start another project, which is to create offsite backups somewhere in the world. There were some requirements: the backup storage to be encrypted, the transfer to be encrypted, and not be so expensive. So, I looked at Vembu and Vinchin again. We were only satisfied with this tool (Vembu) when we started talking about money, because it was cheaper and could easily encrypt our non-dedicated storage.

The initial setup was as easy as one, two, three. I downloaded the software, then ran the application. They have a perfect documentation section on their website where you can find what you need: this tutorial.

Our deployment was about an hour.

We always start any project with a deployment strategy. This includes some type of testing. We go in with the result that we want and compare the software with our requirements. If it fits, then we start to reach the end result.

Currently, our whole offsite backup project, including Vembu, is about $500 per year to back up everything that we have. It is a lot of data, about 50 terabytes.

I find the licensing model to be valuable. The payment model is done with a set price or per virtual machine, and it is also done annually or on a permanent basis. You can choose whichever licensing model you prefer.

For our company, the current price of Vembu against Veeam is a few times cheaper. In our infrastructure, if we picked Veeam, we would have to pay about $20,000 per year. Now, we are currently paying about $2,000 per year for Vembu. You can do the math. The price is great.

Money always matters, so it could be cheaper, but this is not realistic for the market.

When we started to look for this type of software, we had to choose between Veeam, Vembu, or Vinchin. Vinchin is a new player on the market. 

We integrated a service provide into our own solution. This is why I picked Vembu at first, because it can be integrated with a third-party service provider and was the only software able to be integrated into our solution. Vembu offers a cloud offsite service, which is a type of Vembu storage where you can store your backups if you don't have other options.

Vinchin is easier to use with simpler interfaces. However, when you read the features, because it is new software in the market, there were not some functions built-in, like encryption. Vembu encrypts the traffic when it transfers it to its destination. According to our Vinchin and Vembu comparison, Vembu is pretty complicated against Vinchin, but Vembu is easier to install and update.

Reasons why we went with Vembu:

1. The price. 
2. The integration option. 
3. They offered a lot of additional features that we don't use currently, but you never know what you will need in the future.

The software is currently satisfying our needs for us. We aren't using all of Vembu features at the moment.

We use data reservation in our offsite data backup.

It is compatible with almost everything that exists on the market. It's compatible with VMware and Hyper-V. With VMware, it works very well. We haven't had any issues so far. 

I would advise to try it and not to look at the prices of the top players on the market, though do look at alternative software. Sometimes, you need to try more than one or two solutions, then switch to whichever one is better. Pretty often, we speak to some not-so famous product or company to complete our approach.

I would rate the solution as a 10 out of 10.

The primary use for this solution is to replace the old-fashioned backup solution that we had that was based at the application level. I was doing backups of an SQL database or mailboxes from Exchange, but we needed a more modern solution where we could back up the entire virtual machine.

The solution is used for taking a backup of the virtual environment, and the benefit of this is that the speed is a lot higher. The product is taking a full backup during the weekend and takes considerably less time than our old solution. During workdays, it's doing an incremental back up every three hours, and that is also a lot faster. It also gives me a lot of options on which restore point I should use, in case I need to restore something. So these are huge benefits for the organization, speed and multiple restore points, that we didn't have in the past.

Another benefit is that the whole process is running at the ESXi level so the users do not really experience any delays or any lack of performance. We just keep them going, using the infrastructure, the VMware infrastructure. In the past, that was not the case because, during the backup process, it was slowing down the server because the server itself was executing the backup. Now, another server and another hypervisor are executing the job and the end-user does not experience anything as a result of the process. It is going on in the background. No delays at all.

In terms of data protection, we are not using disaster recovery because we are not licensed for it. But given the fact that we can afford the few hours the restore is going to take us, it is reducing costs, and the maintenance we used to have of switching tapes and external drives. All that kind of stuff that we had in the past has now been eliminated.

The most valuable features for me are that I can back up the entire virtual machine, but when restoring I can restore at the file level.

One issue that we are facing is that, during the evaluation period, we had some jobs that were replicating three virtual machines from one ESXi to another. Then, during the license purchase and activation, that Replication functionality was disabled because we are not licensed for it. As a result, we have one job left, the replication job that we were running, but since we don't have access to that area of the product we now, we are unable to delete that job. I need assistance on how to unlist that job.

Otherwise, we have no issues. It's functioning as expected and we're getting the results that we were expecting from the product.

A couple of times, the Vembu server was stuck and we couldn't access the web interface of the server and we had to restart the server. But that was during the migration progress where a lot of the equipment was updated and changing, so we cannot blame the product itself. Since the environment stabilized, we haven't faced any issues at all with the product.

We haven't encountered any issues with scalability. We gave it fewer resources than the server needs. Initially, we configured it with 16 gigs and then we cut it in half, giving it just 8 gigs, and the system is still performing and acting stably and within our needs and expectations.

Our building hosts around six companies. Currently, the product is used only for one hypervisor and one of the companies but the plan is to expand: First, the licensing for more hypervisors, and second, to expand the enterprise solution because we might need to use the Replication function that we are not using at the moment.

Their technical support is excellent. The speed at which those guys are replying is like chatting through email. They reply immediately and, in most of the cases, they have the answer available right away. It is very acceptable and we appreciate that.

We were using Symantec Veritas Backup but it was an old-fashioned solution - at least the version that we were using. It was doing backups on the level of application, taking a backup of a database or directory structure or the like. We switched to Vembu because it allows us to back up the entire virtual infrastructure and then we minimize the downtime in case of an emergency or a failure.

The initial setup was straightforward because it was an appliance. We downloaded an already-installed and already-working virtual machine which is acting as a backup server. There were minor issues to connect it to our local network and set up some iSCSI drives and volumes, etc., but it was next to nothing when compared with having to install it from scratch.

We downloaded the virtual appliance, activated it, and then configured the network interfaces. After that, we connected the server to our hypervisors and the system was up and running. The deployment took four hours.

We didn't use a third-party service provider at all. We directly contacted Vembu, and the back-office and support personnel were very helpful. Every issue was solved within hours.

In terms of money saved, it's hard to say because we need to calculate the man-hours that we spent on monitoring the old system, and the employees that had to visit the computer room and replace or change tapes, etc. So it's not that clear. But the fact that we were using an old solution for about 12 or 13 years, I expect the amount of money we will save is going to be huge.

We have only been using the product for two months in production now, so the return on investment is not easy to see in that short period. But I believe that it's not going to take more than the next six months to see a return on investment, considering the man-hours that we are saving, that we aren't spending any more monitoring an old backup system.

Pricing is fair enough.

What was not clear enough in the documentation on the website was that that you're licensing per CPU socket and you are only licensing on the restore sockets, not the backup sockets. It's a bit technical, but it was very well explained during the demonstration that we had during the evaluation period. The technician explained exactly how the licensing is working. That was information that I couldn't find on their site and it needed to be explained by their representative.

We had in mind to use another solution that was not based on Snapshots. It was based on replicating on the sub-second level of the VM virtual disks. Although it was compelling, and we considered that solution, it didn't have that direct access to information that the Vembu side was giving us.

To get a quotation on that product you needed to find a representative near you and have them do a quotation for you. It was not that direct and immediate. On the other hand, Vembu had all the pricing and documentation listed on their site, so we had all the information we needed. It was within the budget and we decided to test it. That's why we chose Vembu as our solution.

Although Vembu doesn't seem to be very fast for some environments, for example, banking, because it's based on Snapshots, which is a rather slower procedure, it has been just fine. But I would evaluate another solution that is not based on Snapshots. I can for sure recommend Vembu if high-availability is not a requirement.

We are using the compression that is embedded in the system. We downloaded the Linux virtual appliance, Linux Ubuntu, and this appliance is now part of our live organization, it's a live system. The embedded compression system is very satisfactory and we didn't have to alter anything within it. 

We didn't need to activate encryption because our infrastructure is only available within our local network, it's not available outside the firewall, and the destination drive is actually an iSCSI volume that is only accessible through the Vembu backup server. That's why we didn't need to encrypt our backups and possibly add delays to the whole procedure.

We don't use Microsoft Hyper-V, we only use VMware ESXi. The virtual environment that we're backing up through the Vembu solution is one ESXi that hosts three virtual machines. It's an end-to-end VMware solution. During the evaluation period, we also had the option to use the Replication function. We tested it and it's an option for the company to purchase, to upgrade the license to activate it, but this is going to be decided in the future.

The number of end-users using the functionality of the backup solution is around 70, but the end-users don't know it is being used. There are just two system administrators who use the Vembu console as administrators. One is full-time and the other one is part-time, so we need one-and-a-half people to run it. The maintenance is so minor. We just follow up on the emails the server sends saying that we successfully finished a job or that there was an issue. We then visit the web interface look at the reason for that failure - because the server was busy or the like. The maintenance is very easy.

I rate it at eight out of ten because, during the evaluation period, we had a server that was sizing at about 1.8 TB and the product took about 26 to 27 hours to restore it. So the slow restore is an issue. Eventually, we minimized the amount of data. Now, we are less than a terabyte, around 800 gig, so we expect the restore to take less time. But it's the slow restore that makes me give it an eight.