BDRSuite Backup & Replication Reviews

I use it as a backup solution for our VMware system.

I get my backups done. If I don't get my backups done and something goes wrong, I lose my job. The benefit of using it is that I keep my job.

Vembu helps me deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce budgets.

The cost is one of the most valuable features.

The problem that I had getting this up and running was that when I put in a backup plan, and wanted to run that backup plan, that plan had to go onto the server that it's going to do the backup on, and it had to pass on credentials. It would be nice, when you create the credentials for logging on to the server, if it would immediately verify that those credentials work. What ended up happening is I'd have to wait until nighttime to really figure out whether those credentials were valid or not. That prompted me to call support.

We've been using Vembu, as a company, for about three months.

The stability has been okay.

The scalability is fine.

I'm the only one in our organization who uses the solution and I'm responsible for its maintenance.

The problem that I really had — and it was not the product — is that when I called in, the phone system is a negative five on a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst. They wanted me to leave a message. When there is a problem with the product and you call in, you want to talk to somebody or wait to talk to somebody, not leave a message. If our system is down and someone says to me, "What's going on? Our system is down. Our company's not running. What are you doing?" the conversation would go something like this:

"I'm waiting for a phone call back." 

"You're waiting for a what? A phone call back? You get on that phone and get those guys on the line." 

And he would use some other choice words before the word "phone."

Their response was quick, but I'd rather wait on hold. I'll listen to music. In that same scenario where someone asks me what is happening and I say, "Oh, I'm on hold. I'm waiting for support to respond to me," they would say, "Oh, okay. That's good. You've got it under control." It's all perception. Have you ever run a program and it just sits there and sits there and you have no idea how long it's going to take for the update to finish? A minute becomes an hour. It was like that. Their phone system is horrible, terrible.

The support itself was good. The technician was good. However, they all seem to be from India and language could be a problem, although I have not found that to be an issue so far. I would like to see more support from the U.S. I'd rather speak to someone from the U.S. than someone from another country. That's just a preference: "Made in the USA."

The initial setup was pretty easy. I'm going to reconfigure it to be loaded onto the actual VMware machine, but I just don't want to do that at this time. Right now it's running as a software product. I want to run it closer to the VM machine itself, as a fixture associated with it.

The deployment took about an hour. Our implementation strategy was simply to get it to work. We needed the backup.

I did it myself.

It does what it's supposed to do.

The pricing is fair.

I did some research and I looked at some reviews.

I bought it for doing a backup using VMware vSphere and just started with VMware. But I use another product with our legacy system, a product called Acronis. If I were to compare Vembu with Acronis Backup I would say it's comparable, but it's more cost-effective.

If you need phone support, don't buy the product.

I would rate Vembu, overall, as a five out of ten. It would be a ten if they fixed the phone system. I have to hammer that in.

We're doing onsite local backups as well as offsite DR of our VM infrastructure.

Realistically, it is no different than the previous backup solution we were using, other than it costs less. As far as workflow is concerned, it hasn't really changed.

We use it to back up our VM infrastructure, but as far as benefiting the organization, it's just a guarantee that, if we go down, I can spool it back up at either location. That's the biggest benefit to this sort of backup solution, instead of files on another drive.

This is a part of our enterprise backup solution. It has saved us a considerable amount of money.

The agentless backups are the big selling point on this, as well as being able to send out across sites so that I can do a restore at either of our two locations.

The compression is good. As far as the encryption is concerned, I'm glad that it's there for site to site. We don't necessarily need it just because of the way that we're connected, so it's not really a selling feature, one way or the other.

The only place where I would really want to see improvement, out the gate, is more granular scheduling. With the previous solution that we were using, you could pick different times based on different days. Right now, with Vembu, I just have every X number of hours on these days, but if I want to do an offset or to only do two backups on Friday and Saturday - versus whole hourly incrementals during the week - I don't have that granularity. That would be something that I would be looking for.

With the exception of when we required that initial hotfix, it has been extremely stable.

Scalability is part of the reason why we got it. The opportunity to push the offsite data recovery to multiple sites, instead of just, one was a big selling feature for us. Currently, we are a two-location organization, but we want the opportunity to be able to scale up and pop another one of these units down to another location and have them replicate freely between.

The tech support is phenomenal. We were not expecting a fix to happen as quickly as it did. The response time, through everything I've experienced so far with them, has been within an hour.

We did use a different solution previous to this. It was an onsite and cloud-based solution. With the cloud-based component, we switched because of the cost savings with Vembu, because we have two sites that we can leverage. The two sites are for disaster recovery, which is far cheaper than doing a cloud-based backup.

We had a few issues with the initial setup that were solved by support. The actual installation of the software was simple enough. However, there was a bug. We required a hotfix to get two of our larger backups going. But that was remedied within a few days by their engineering team and it has been working flawlessly since. With the exception of just waiting for that to go, it was fairly painless.

The deployment took roughly a week. But we were also figuring out a bunch of different backend stuff as well, so it wasn't a week on the software package in particular. It's a part of a larger backup solution. To get the entire thing up and going was about a week.

In terms of implementation strategy, we did build-outs on separate servers so that we would have dedicated servers that would be doing the backups, instead of having the BDR suite reside on our VM infrastructure. The reasons for that strategy were

1. to limit overhead on our current infrastructure and 
2. if any of our hosts went down, our backup would not be part and parcel of our host network. 

It was completely segregated, just to keep the business continuity intact as much as possible.

We were in trial for about a month, and the actual deployment has been in place for about a month.

We did it all in-house.

Our return in investment for this solution, including all the additional hardware that we chose to purchase for it, including hard drives and the server host that it runs on, as well the subscription, means it will be about a six- to seven-month return on investment for us.

The subscription model that we're signed up for is very good. The only thing that is something of a sticking point is the fact that you can't do PO-based licensing. It's all just credit card. That required a little bit of a sell for management because typically everything we do is PO-based and our previous solution was PO-based. That would be the only thing about the subscription service that we didn't really enjoy.

We were really only looking at Vembu. It was brought to our attention by a reseller we had used for another product, as the backup solution that they typically push for clients. We thought we would take a look at it and, after we ran our trials, we found that it would work for us.

Have a separate backup appliance, if you can, a separate, physical backup appliance so that if your host goes, your backup doesn't go down with it at the same time.

As far as the encryption is concerned, I'm glad that it's there for site to site. We don't necessarily need it just because of the way that we're connected, so it's not really a selling feature, one way or the other.

We don't use Hyper-V. Our Vembu is working with EXSi. I have not had to do a full server restore, yet. But I have had to do restores of incremental points in time, for certain files. We have tested the restore feature of the entire guest VM. If I have a server go down, I have a lot of people who can't do work. So a fast restore is critical.

It's just our core IT team that is actually using the solution. There are three people who have direct access to it, but we serve a larger number of users in our organization. However, they don't see anything as far as backend or backups are concerned. As far as they know, nothing's changed, nothing's different, it has no effect or impact on their day-to-day operations.

For deployment and maintenance, now that it's set up, there's not much to do on it, aside from doing checks every so often to ensure that the backups are still happening.

There is a potential use case to increase usage, such as doing some critical workstation backups with it. However, we are not doing that at this time.

I give the solution an eight out of ten. Everything has some room for improvement. The more granular backup scheduling is one of them. There was a slight hiccup that we weren't really expecting, when we were first looking into this, where you can't do a restore while a backup is in process. That was a bit of an annoyance at first, but once we got an explanation from their technical team as to why it's designed and built out like that, it made more sense. It's just one thing that I realize they can't fix but it would be a nice to have.

The primary use case is for backup.

I am using the latest version.

What we like best about the system is the use of its operation and the backups versus what we had to do earlier. We use it to back up our virtual environments, mainly VMware.

Everything is happening in the background without running any commands. It runs seamlessly in the back, so this is a great achievement. This is also a great convenience for this organization. Previously, somebody had to do it manually all the time.

We are now using it 24/7 because it is serving as an online backup, and very soon, the DR will activated on the product.

We invest in the backup so the continuity of the data is not affected.

It takes the sever directly from your VM environment.

The compression, encryption, and deduplicatuion are quite useful.

We are still exploring its features, but we want to see more features that we desire over time.

It is fairly stable.

At the moment, we have an administrator whose responsible for the device.

I am the only person handling the device. It is very straightforward, We have just one person in the organization, a consultant, and I don't go to the site on a daily basis.

I am happy with the technical support. Whenever I have contacted them, I have received the results that I was looking for.

This is the first time that we used this type of solution. We were quite happy with what we received.

The initial setup was quite good. There were no major hiccups.

Even the support teams supported us, which was quite helpful. The deployment took a few minutes. 

I am the consultant. I recommended this solution to my client.

I think this solution will help us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduce budgets. We will be moving more into that very soon.

The pricing could have been cheaper.

With another client, we had looked at Veritas. wihich is also quite stable. Between this solution and Veritas, I found this solution to be more user-friendly in terms of its interface.

Go for it. This solution suits organizations where there is no dedicated IT manpower. It can be managed by somebody, like a consultant, who can handle the entire thing. 

We are quite happy with the latest version and how it works. We are convinced that this is the right product.

I haven't used it with Microsoft Hyper-V.

We use it to back up a test lab type of environment. It's a virtual environment where we use Hyper-V.

The way it improves our organization is that we haven't worried about looking at backups in about a year or so, it's just been running on its own. It also delivers an enterprise-level of data protection and helps with our budget. I estimate we have saved $3,000 - $4,000.

The most valuable feature is the Hyper-V backup - it's just one click. I don't have to worry about it.

There's a feature that does syncing with AWS Cloud backup online. It's not that straightforward to get it set up.

We haven't encountered any issues with the stability of the product.

I haven't tested the scalability yet.

Tech support has been pretty good. I've reached out to them a couple of times and they answered my questions. The support has been pretty decent.

We previously used Veeam. Vembu is much cheaper than the competitor, than the Veeam suite. That's why we went with it.

It was very easy to set up. It took us about 30 minutes to deploy it.

I prefer the way Vembu is licensed. When you look at Veeam or any other product, they price per node. Vembu is licensed per host. You just buy a host license and it backs up unlimited VMs within that host. The others charge per VM.

We evaluated Veeam, Comet, and Windows' built-in backup.

Look at the options out there. If you're looking for a cheaper solution go with this. If you're looking for more features and integrations with other solutions, then you would have to go Veeam.

Although we use it with Hyper-V, I don't know if it enables high-availability. We currently just have the one user, the test environment backup.

I rate Vembu a nine out of ten. The one point off is because the cloud sync options are not that straightforward to set up.

We were looking for a backup for Red Hat Virtualization. We don't need any advanced features from a backup solution yet. We don't have VMware or Hyper-V, we only have Red Hat Virtualization.

We are a service provider and we have many customers but we are only using this solution for one of our customers. They have a small environment with four servers.

It was very difficult to find a product that supports Red Hat Virtualization natively and to take a snapshot of the VM or a full backup or a dump from the machine. The option that Vembu proposed, to take the machine as an image, take it from the system, is also good. It has enhanced our backup system. Before, it was very difficult and we did it manually. Now, it's easy to take an image from Red Hat.

BDR Suite helps us deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce our budgets. It is about half of the cost of other products we looked at.

• It's easy to install.
• It's simple to configure.

They said they can support Red Hat Virtualization and we assumed that they support any compatible system but we found we need to do a network backup or a network image, which is not what it said on their website. I have had many discussions with them about where this component is. Initially, I was searching for a component which would back up Red Hat Virtualization. They said they support this in the same way they support Hyper-V and VMware. I haven't found the feature in their portal or in any of their software. They haven't made a special agent for it, in the way they did for Hyper-V.

When we were in negotiations and discussing this with their pre-sales, we said we haven't found any documents from them talking about how they support Red Hat Virtualization. At the end of the day they said, "No, we deal with Red Hat Virtualization in the same way that we take an image of a file through the network." It's not native in the solution itself. For VMware they have a special agent. But for Red Hat, it's just a network backup, the same as files. When I asked about a license to support Red Hat, they said you just take the network backup and it will do the same job.

For the moment, that is fine for us. We will take the image. But it is not what we expected from the product.

We started with it just before the [COVID-19] lockdown in April, but we haven't worked much with it yet.

We have yet to test the stability of the solution.

We have also not yet tested the scalability.

In the future we may increase usage if we find it's good for backup. We plan to take the DR solution from them.

We haven't had to contact technical support yet.

We have used many solutions in the past. We switched to Vembu because of the Red Hat Virtualization. Our old solutions don't support it.

The initial setup was straightforward. There were no difficulties and no advanced settings that you need to learn before you do the setup. We had it deployed within minutes.

We have an enterprise license. We found it very simple and straightforward. For our needs, the price of the backup system is not too much.

However, the prices are not clear in the portal. Not all the items are listed.

We checked out Veeam and Acronis but both were very expensive compared to Vembu.

I can recommend Vembu for those who need just file backup.

It's a straightforward solution. It was easy to install and deploy for many machines, taking backups from files and servers in the same way. They offer 10 GB for cloud that you can use for free.

We haven't tested its compression, encryption, or deduplication features yet. So far, just our system admin is using and maintaining the solution.

The primary intended target for it was VMware backup and utilizing it in a VMware environment. It is a production, Active Directory, file server type of environment.

I am using the current version.

It hasn't improved the way our company functions from an operational standpoint.

The compression, encryption, and deduplication features are fabulous and great stuff.

What would have been most valuable for me, would have been the convenience and ease of doing the VMware backups along with the ability to provide a low-level, file level, restore all capability without having to structure the detailed Windows Backups association. So, an ease of setup with a granularity of a restore all capability without having to use a standard Windows Backup. I would need to upgrade my VM environment for this to work currently.

I investigated Vembu probably for the first time a couple of years back. I evaluated it in just a quick and dirty manner without any real followup on it. Subsequent to that, I have been more actively utilizing it for about a year.

It seems to be stable. No concerns about that.

Two people are required for deployment and maintenance of this solution.

My impression of the scalability is good. My scalability requirement isn't what some others might be, but the solution appears to be fully scalable.

It is being used in probably 80 percent of our environment. It's not a large environment. We probably won't scale out to the remainder. Eventually, the environment will be drawn in to the point where it's probably 100 percent of the environment that will be covered under Vembu, then that environment will be relatively stable. It won't change past that.

There are just a couple of us actually utilizing it. We're relatively small, so there are really just a couple of users for admin in there. It's a support environment.

From both the sales and technical support standpoint, they have been great. They have helped out to the extent that they can, but it hasn't been enough. There are things that they can't do and it's going to have to happen on my side (in my production environment). It was not clear from the evaluation level, when we ran through evaluation on it, that this was going to be an issue when we got to production.

Previously, it was a bit different because our environment had been a hosted environment. There was a different tool being utilized by the hosted provider. Our implementation of Vembu was a standup as we brought something in-house.

The initial setup was straightforward.

There were issues with the implementation because of incompatibilities between the tool implementation and our current VMware installation. So, it was an implementation issue that doesn't allow me to use it for VMware backup in the manner in which we would want to use it. That wasn't clear from the evaluation stage nor was it clear from the first utilization of it because it worked in the environment that it was being evaluated in. Based on that, we went ahead and made the purchase of the full implementation. At that point, it became clear that there would be limitations in that implementation that could not be overcome without doing upgrades to the production environment.

The evaluation and deployment took a couple of months.

To get through the evaluation did require support from from them. They were supportive and did provide that support.

There was an implementation strategy with some specific needs that were fulfilled by Vembu. It was an implementation strategy that included a consolidation and transition at the same time. It was a bit of a complex strategy and Vembu fulfilled it. Vembu was the tool of choice because of its ability to do that and because of the features in the suite. What was disconcerting was that it was able to do that part of it, but then when we went to put it into full production, then we encountered these other difficulties that hadn't been planned for or counted on.

To continue to do backups, we fell back to Windows Backup mode. We are still using the tool, but not in the manner in which we would have wanted. The tool purchase doesn't cover all options of the tool, e.g., if I go in and buy it, I have to buy it licensed for VMware Backups, not Windows Backups. At this point, what had to happen was they had to allow it to operate in Windows Backup so I could continue to back up the VMs, but in a trial mode. The trial mode has been extended once, and now we're reaching the limit of that extension again. Because I still haven't been able to update the production VMware environment such that the tool will operate in it in the manner in which I want it to operate, I'm stuck having to go back again to say, "Sorry, I need to extend this trial on it again." Even though I've paid, I'm still only able to operate in a trial mode. So, it's been difficult for us. 

I've purchased and been licensed for one aspect of it, which is my preferred method, but the pricing and licensing will not work for the short-term and I can't draw back.

Yes, we did survey others. We didn't match up evaluations. We just didn't have a lot of resources for it. There was a desktop environment to a test evaluation.

We primarily went with Vembu for its flexibility and features.

You should never evaluate in your production environment, but make sure your evaluation is done as close as possible to your target.

We are not using it with Hyper-V.

I would rate this product in the high eights or nine (out of 10).

We back up servers and workstations.

One of the things that Vembu does for us is, of course, create high-availability for backups, which, if we came to a worst-case scenario, is one of the reasons we selected it, with the high incidence of ransomware. Should we be hit with ransomware, optimally it would allow us to be back up and running pretty quickly.

The solution helps us deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce budgets. It's difficult to estimate how much we have saved, although I know we have saved. We did do a cost analysis up-front and we saved money compared to our prior solution.

The most valuable feature is the ability, from a console, to manage the different computers to be backed up.

In addition, I use the encryption regularly, and the deduplication as well, but not extensively. The deduplication is very handy. It reduces the size of the backups, which we can then upload to an online storage platform. That's one of the reasons I selected it.

We've been using Vembu for about nine months.

I have had issues where it was working and then it stopped and I had to diagnose what had changed or gone wrong to get it back up. While it is generally stable, I've had issues with stability. The last time we had this issue was about six weeks ago.

It's very scalable. As we add workstations, as we grow, we'll generally use the solution on those new workstations.

Customer service could be improved. There seems to be a delay when trying to get to someone for customer service issues. Usually they'll tell me to send an email. That is one area that I would like to see improved.

I had pretty good technical support while we were evaluating the product. Since then, it has not been so good.

We had a solution before Vembu. We switched because of the cost factor and the deduplication.

It was not particularly straightforward. I had to contact customer service in order to complete the initial set up. The deployment took us the better part of a day to complete everything, because we had to reach out to customer service.

We started out by testing it on a workstation and, once we were satisfied that it met our needs, we deployed it to the servers and to the other workstations.

We did it in-house.

The pricing is pretty reasonable.

We looked at Macrium Reflect. That was another solution that we used.

It's a robust solution. Evaluate it first in the environment and ensure that it actually satisfies your needs. It's a fairly cost-effective solution. For us, it has assisted in developing a robust backup strategy of keeping a backup in-house. We back up to a NAS in-house, and then we try to do an online backup off the in-house backup, so that we always have a remote copy of our backup. So it's been a pretty robust solution.

We have about 25 workstations that we're backing up. There are two of us, my IT person and me, who handle the deployment and management of the backup solution.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten because customer service could be improved. I don't have a specific problem with the product. In our experience, the initial implementation could be easier. The product itself, once implemented, gets the job done. If it was divided up, I would give the working product a ten. But the initial implementation, from our experience, because we needed to have customer service log in to our system and walk us through, I would give a seven. And I would give customer service a seven.

Backup and replication.

If we have any issues with servers having been corrupted or damaged, we are able to restore our backups. We are also able to store our backups offsite, in case of fire. Right now I'm using it with VMware. The benefit is being able to replicate the information to a different offsite building where I can store it. We're an FQHC and we have to have an offsite backup in case of a fire.

If we were to lose all of our data we wouldn't be able to operate. We run a 24-hour clinic, we have an ER department, and the data needs to be safe. If we didn't have that information stored safely, our patient information, we would not be able to run the business. So it's very valuable for us.

It also saves us time being able to do backups automatically instead of manually.

Finally, for reporting purposes, it's safer for us to have multiple places where backups are stored. We feel safe that the information is backed up more than once.

The most important feature is the Restore, to be able to restore in a disaster recovery situation.

If the English accent of the support agents was a little better, so that we, as the users, could understand it better, that would be nice. It's very hard to understand the support people when we talk to them because of the accent.

We haven't encountered any issues with the stability so far. It's been working fine.

It can handle a lot because it's doing a whole data center, so it's handling everything.

Tech support is good.

I purchased Veeam but my local reseller sold me only a minimal number of licenses and I was not told that I needed to purchase many licenses. So it was not cost-effective for us to have that solution installed here.

The initial setup was not complex at all. It was easy.

It's very hard to estimate ROI. If I have a disaster issue here, my whole company is down, so I cannot put a value on it. It's really the value of the whole company. If we don't have that data we aren't able to run. It's a very valuable tool for us.

The pricing is good. 

Veeam was one of the options we looked at.

Test it first. Make sure it works in your environment. But I will also say that it's an immediate investment that needs to be done.

We aren't using the compression or encryption features. We don't need them.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It's not a ten because the accent of the customer support agents is very difficult to understand. You have to ask a few times when speaking to them. That's the only issue, the rest of it is good. It's a good product. It's working.