BDRSuite Backup & Replication Reviews

The biggest improvement has been the ability to allow us as an MSSP to continuously gather extra revenue from this software, so we can use it to back up our clients' data offsite. This is one of the reasons why we enjoy the product and we've enjoyed using it for this long.

When it comes to backup software, one of the biggest things that I use to enjoy about StoreGrid, this changed recently, was the support.

I enjoy the ease of the UI and how simple it is to use compared to other products.

They had a good product and tried to change things by going to a different product. They should have tried to stay with a product that is a proven solution and successful.

One of the biggest things that they lack at the moment, which their competitors currently have, is a hardware device that we can deploy at a client's location. We can have local backup stored on the device and replicate over to our cloud. That's basically one of the biggest concerns that we see for their company that we currently think they are lacking compared to other competitors.

Two or three years ago, they had an amazing support team, especially for the StoreGrid product, which is something that we're currently using. But around a year and a half ago, they brought out a new product called BDR, which from my understanding is horrible. We tried it and didn't like that the support just started going down a bit. They started transitioning more to the BDR side and left the StoreGrid part out.

The system is very stable. It's ideal for our day-to-day basis. I've been using StoreGrid ever since I started working here over five years. It's a good product. We haven't upgraded to the latest patch they've released, and the product still works fine. Overall, we think the actual system software works great. 

I have encountered some stability issues, but certain things are awkward to do when it comes to restoring and pulling data, e.g., cracking Exchange databases, pulling emails, and restoring mailboxes.

I would give technical support a five out of 10, because we've had issues in the past where calls haven't been answered. I do call them a lot and the majority of the times, I'm going to the United States, although I know this company is based out of India, and they have offices here. However, when I call during the weekends I've had the following issues:

• Calls which aren't being picked up.
• Phone rings for hours.
• Calls go directly to voicemail.
• Emergency over weekend where they didn't get back to me for over 32 hours.
• Often takes over two days for me to get somebody on support.

Originally, it seemed like they were staffed for the actual support need, but now it doesn't appear like it. Only in the past few months have I seen minor improvements. I do understand that in the past year or so, there have been some changes.

However, when it comes to knowledge, they're always willing to help; I would say they're always on top of things. As for being knowledgeable, I would rate them as an eight out of 10.

I didn't previously use a different solution. I really don't remember because when I took on this position, the solution was already out here. From my understanding though, we did use a similar solution. It really comes down to pricing.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It's fairly simple and easy, and they make our lives a lot easier when dealing with the licensing and actually purchasing licensing, keeping them in the vault, keeping them in our bank. It gives us an additional way to resell and earn a little extra here and there from other clients. When we do build out servers, backup servers, for them and we have them out on site, we can obviously use the licensing to license their system to obviously mark up and make some money.

Somebody already took on that decision prior to my being here.

Give it a chance. It's a decent product, although not the best of its kind. It is lacking in certain aspects. A piece of hardware being deployed out at a client's office would be ideal. There are a lot of products out there, and it's in the middle of the pack.

We have a multi-tenant environment with multi-cloud, but we are only using this for our local data center backups. This is a small setup with around 50 to 60 VMs.

We are able to back up our local virtual machines. Without backup we could end up in very critical situations.

It backs up our virtual machines with the CBT, Changed Block Tracking. This is a common feature. We don't have a complex hierarchy here because we have a local data center with minimal use. 

The compression ratio is fine and the deduplication is as well. We are not using the encryption feature yet, as we only deployed it recently. We may use it later on.

The reports are at a basic level and there is room for improvement there. It only has historical reports and VM backup job-level reports.

I have been using BDR Suite for about three or four months.

The stability is okay, it's running fine. Up to now we haven't had any negative issues.

Technical support is good. Whenever I raise a ticket they reply in a timely fashion.

Our basic goal is the backup of our infrastructure. We chose this platform because it's cost-effective.

The initial setup is very straightforward. The solution is very easy. It's not a complex one where we need to follow detailed diagrams. I installed and tested everything and it's running fine now.

Initially, I had some issues but I fixed them myself. When I deployed this tool it was having issues with some virtual machines, specifically with Windows 2019. Fortunately, I was able to fix that issue by updating the Windows version to the latest software.

The whole setup took one or two days, including the installation and configuration of servers. 

Fixing the issue I mentioned took some days because I need to update the servers. Otherwise, the overall deployment did not take a long time.

In terms of a deployment plan, before deployment I considered my whole environment and then I started the deployment. Our IT team is just three or four people and I did it myself.

I didn't need too much help for Vembu, other than for licensing. They helped me on the licensing purchase.

The pricing is very good compared to Veeam. Veeam is very well-known software for backup and replication, and comparing Vembu to that, from the financial aspect, Vembu is very good.

I deployed Veeam and it worked very well, but the problem was that its price was very high. As a result, I searched for another solution and found Vembu. I deployed it and we have been happy with it. For us, the major difference was the pricing.

Our environment is at a very basic level. We don't have multi-level vCenters or cloud. Vembu BDR Suite is working fine for us. Right now we have only three hosts with virtual machines and it's okay for us. 

Overall, this suite is very good. It has features which we use like a backup proxy and test processing. It delivers an enterprise-level data protection solution and helps us reduce our budget. It's cost-effective.

Primary use is for vSphere or VMware.

• Ease of use
• Configuration
• Support

Live support would be helpful. I've communicated with them via email and through incidents. It might be better if you could have a chat or phone call because backups are important. You don't want to wait for an email. I know of other vendors that have a number you can call; they have people around the clock. It would be good to have a number you can call and your call is answered and taken care of, because backups normally occur at night, not during the day.

I would also like to see more documentation or videos. They have some videos out there on how to do steps, or for training, or to help you know more about their product.

Another leftover issue is that when you get notifications via email on an iPhone, there is only a certain amount of space to view it without having to open the email itself. I have four backup jobs. Their subject line shows "Vembu backup software..." and at the very end they put the server name and whether it succeeded or failed. I asked them if they could put the server name, and whether it succeeded or failed, first. That way, when I look through my emails it tells me whether it's succeeded or failed, and which server. Currently what I have to do is open up each email, and then scroll through to the very end, because it's a very long subject line. They say it's not customizable, and that they are going to look at improving on that in the future.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

I have enjoyed the support. They're very quick in turning around solutions for the issues and problems that I have had. You get a good turnaround. It takes a little while, but they document it. You can log in to their website and create a ticket, and see in real-time if it has been updated. It's really nice.

We went from a physical server to a virtual server. Vembu is cost-effective versus using VMware Essentials.

The setup wasn't altogether straightforward. There were a lot of items. It took me about two weeks before I could finally get things the way I needed them to be.

The product's pricing is a good value. Regarding licensing, make sure you find the right workstation or server that you're going to install it on, and know the number of sockets it has, since the price depends on that.

VMware Essentials, it has backup and restores capabilities. We also used BackupAssist.

Try it with the trial version. You get free rein of everything there. Test it out and make sure everything works right. You'll find it's easy to use and there is good support, as far as emails back and forth. That gives you plenty of time to try it, and then you can implement it once you've figured out all the items and how to get to things, as well as its limitations. That's pretty much what I did. I got a server and installed the full license and went to town. I put some backups on there and got familiar with it. It was pretty much straightforward.

Also, look at some of the training videos. They make it much clearer.

I like Vembu because of the price point, the ease of use, the support, and it being full-featured backup software for the needs that I have. I would rate it 10, but the one thing is the email notifications, that I mentioned above, that aren't customizable. Maybe adding more customization for the end-user, in the settings, some additional options, would help.

We do cloud hosting for our customers, and we do reselling when they want to do VMware on their premises.

The backup of VMware ESX is the most important to us. That's what we use. We use it to back up all of our private cloud, and it's backed up hourly.

We sent a letter complaining about how the lack of customer service has caused us problems. We're actually dumping Vembu and we're going with Veeam, and we're asking for our money back. The thing that needs to be improved most is their customer support. The product itself is fine, but the customer support is basically nonexistent.

Instead of helping us meet new challenges it has actually caused us problems. We wanted a backup solution so that we could quickly back up and recover all of our customer virtual machines. In case something happened to the hardware, we could quickly recover it on different hardware. We looked at different solutions such as Veeam and Vembu. Vembu was recommended to us and we found it to be cheaper than Veeam but, unfortunately, because they're based in India, not in North America, the customer service doesn't even provide phone support.

We had a lot of problems getting it configured in the first place. They also wanted us to allow them remote access to our machines without us watching what they're doing, which is a huge security risk for us. We said we couldn't do that, and they said they don't offer any phone support whatsoever.

The product itself actually works mostly well. One of the features of the product is Application-Aware and that does not work properly. When we tested it with the Veeam product, it did work properly. We tried to get it to work, to get support to help get it working. It went back and forth for about two weeks through email, trying to get help to get this feature working, and it just did not work.

With the Application-Aware setting, the stability was near zero on a scale of one to ten.

As far as scalability goes, everything seemed okay. I would rate it around a seven out of ten.

I would rate technical support at one out of ten. I don't even know why they have a tech support phone number because I was told in an email from a manager that they don't provide tech support over the phone. Every time I call the tech support phone number, I'm told I have to send an email to support@vembu.com. I said that I would pay extra for premium support but they said they don't even offer it.

The initial setup was complicated because of the Application-Aware feature not working.

For someone who doesn't want the Application-Aware feature to work, everything else is up to par. The licensing is straightforward. They license it per CPU. 

One thing to note is that when you configure which virtual machine you're going to back up, if it's on one physical machine, they license it there. If it automatically fails over to a second machine, the license doesn't automatically move over with it. If they could make that a little more streamlined, that would be an improvement.

We did test Veeam. Vembu vs Veeam came in as a lot less expensive, but I guess you get what you pay for. That’s why we have already sent an email to Vembu saying we want our money back.

We looked at a few other products, but we didn't try them all out.

We've already gone ahead and purchased Veeam, and already tested the Veeam phone support while just on a trial. Someone picks up the phone right away and helps you resolve it. They do remote access, but they let you be on the call when they're doing remote access. They never access your machines without your permission, etc., whereas Vembu was the opposite.

My advice would be not to go with Vembu if you're in North America because it's too hard to get ahold of anybody in India.

We were a reseller, but we've canceled that. We've told all our customers that we're not reselling Vembu because of the problems with the tech support and the problems with the Application-Aware feature not working.

I would rate Vembu at three out of ten because for simple configurations it works fine, but overall, their tech support is very poor. Conversations with tech support and the way they handle tech support are very poor. One example is that I was told that they want to access our servers, but that I wouldn't be allowed to be on the phone and watch what they're doing. I can't be sure that they're only accessing what they're supposed to be doing. The other thing is, they don't offer any extended or premium support. Vembu is for a low-end, small company which doesn't want to do much.

We use it for backing up virtual machines.

The ability to back up virtual machines is the main reason I use it.

Vembu software runs on a Windows Server. The Windows Server has to be connected to the internet so it can connect with Vembu’s servers. It has to connect with Vembu. For some reason, if it doesn't connect, it stops working, and I don't know why on earth they do that. They require it to connect to the internet and connect with Vembu for it to continue to function. If the internet is down or if the server can't reach the internet, it stops working after a few days. That's not great because there are some people who want to do backups but they don't want to have their server accessible on the internet.

I think that's a horrible design, but it's purposely built in that way. It's something that they put in the product, and I don't know why they did that. To me, that’s a terrible design.

If you bought a new car in the year 2525, a Ford, and your car had to have a connection to the Ford dealership or the Ford company and the connection stopped, and then your Ford car was going to stop working in three days, what would you think about that? But that's the way this software works. They did it, and it’s a horrible design. That's what I don't like about it.

I have never had stability issues with the product.

I haven't had to scale it. It was a small environment so there was no need for me to scale or grow, so I can't really comment as to the scaling capacity.

Technical support gets an A-plus.

The reason I use Vembu is to back up my virtual machines. You can back up virtual machines manually but Vembu does it automatically. I'd rather have it updated and backed up automatically, without my having to think about it, rather than for me to have to remember to do it every couple of weeks. This is just an automated way to do something that you should do, and that's the reason why I have it.

The previous process I had was to manually back it up, but now it's automatic and I don't have to worry about it.

It was pretty easy to set it up.

When I upgraded my VMware to version 6, Vembu provided me with an update. That was just a continuation of what it did, but at least they provided the update.

I didn’t do an ROI spreadsheet because this is a time-saver. You can't sell it on ROI. You can sell it on the fact that it is a time-saving tool.

Vembu is too expensive because they don't really have small-business pricing. This is a matter of personal opinion. They're going to tell you that they have competitive pricing because there are more expensive solutions in the marketplace, but there are better solutions in the marketplace that are more expensive. Their product is a better fit for small businesses, but they don't price it that way.

I think they're losing a lot of money by pricing it too high. If the alternative is to manually do backups and they start charging ridiculous pricing for their products, they're not going to sell that many copies. That's probably why they don't. They've got a good product, but they price themselves out of business. That's my opinion.

If I were running Vembu, I would have a small-business suite that's priced for small business. I would allow customers to buy it without a partner, just go direct and price it for small businesses. They would make a lot more money, but they don't want to do that. They want to try to price it ridiculously. It's their call, it’s their product. They made it.

I know many companies won't bother at that price. They’ll just do it manually. I know because I know the market very well here, in the US. I don't think Vembu is a US company. I don't know where they're from.

Their product does a good job. It's just not meant for large environments, so they’re pricing themselves too high. That's just my opinion. Someone will come in and force them to lower their price. As soon as another company comes in, does an online version of it or it does a cost-effective version, they’re going to be forced to deal with this if they want to sell more licenses.

There were other options, but I liked this product. I thought it was easy to use so I took it on. I worked for a partner at the time, and I was going to try to resell it, but I found it to be just too expensive.

The other solution that seems to do better for enterprise customers, the big companies, like Trader Joe's, big retail outlets like that or large grocery stores or hospitals, is Veeam. Veeam costs a little bit more. As expensive as Vembu is, Veeam is actually a little bit more. But because Veaam is meant for larger companies, they sell more instances of it. And by the time you buy the 25-license or 30-license version, it's actually cheaper.

Veeam seems to have much more presence in the marketplace because it's more competitive and scales much larger. I've used Veeam and it's harder to install it, it's harder to get it working. Veeam offers a free version and a small-business solution, but that version doesn't scale well. It's too big. It's like selling a truck to a person who needs a small car. That’s Veeam. Whereas Vembu, they sell a small car, but they want to price it like the huge truck.

Try to negotiate the price. Try to get it to the right price. As a partner, I would try to position it for small and medium-size businesses. I would work with Veeam and say, “Listen. I can't sell it at that price. You're going to have to be more competitive.” As a partner, I would recommend working more with Veeam. It's easy to sell because it's a good product, but I'd be working on the price. It's easy to implement, easy to set up. You can be low a low-tech company and get someone to figure out how to do it easily enough. 

The challenge I would have would be getting Vembu to price it competitively. If they aren't willing to, just go with Veeam or tell them to do a manual backup or go with some other solution.

Vembu is a great product. It's priced too high, but it's a good product.

Backup virtual machines on VMware.

I am able to verify we have availability of our VMs in case a failure occurs.

• Quick backup and restore
• Very simple and understandable interface

I am still testing restores and it seems some problems may be related to our hardware. Because we have not implemented the correct hardware yet I cannot be sure where the problem is.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

I run into the problem of their chat service not being available frequently. I like chat as it is quick.

When it is not available I have to get a support ticket going. I was asked to provide a TeamViewer number and that was fine. However, I was waiting for a while and needed to go to lunch. If the TeamViewer session could be accessed either within 15 minutes or scheduled, so I know when they will connect, it would be helpful. It is really necessary that I be available during the session as there are questions. I do not want to be chained to my computer while I wait for the session to start.

The prior solution took hours to restore a computer. When it was done it had an error that the support staff couldn't figure out. While they were trying to figure it out, I installed a trial version of Vembu BDR with no assistance from Vembu support as it was so simple. I was able to perform a backup and restore easily. And the most important item was the restore time which took 15 minutes.

Very straightforward. It seemed to be mostly intuitive, although in some areas I had to think about the functionality. I then referred to the instructions and had no issues.

The pricing structure is in line with other solutions. However, the option to replicate offsite to a unit at another office or at home is a big cost benefit. Instead of paying monthly for cloud storage, you replicate offsite for free. If preferred, you can also replicate to Vembu offsite.

We currently use StorageCraft ShadowProtect which is a really good product. As we move forward with Vembu we will want to standardize on Vembu. It seems it is more flexible as a total solution for physical, virtual, file/image backups and offsite provision.

Download the product and give it a run through. With some products, this is a tough process as you spend a lot of time testing and they don't work correctly or have enough benefit to justify a purchase. Then, you have wasted all that time. But Vembu was quick and simple enough, it did not waste a lot of time.

The primary use case is to be able to back up data outside of on-premise with the ability to restore as fast as possible. We also use Vembu NetworkBackup to selectively back up files on the file share along with our virtual machines. It gives us more control over what we can backup and restore, especially in the files.

We use this solution to back up our virtual environments. 

All the features are valuable for different reasons. 

The restoring of virtual machines and deduplication features are good. We save time by recreating or deduplicating a machine, as it done automatically. With one or two clicks, we can get something done. We are then pretty sure it is the same as it was before; it is a real duplicate. The deduplication features are useful for accelerating the transfers and when we have more than one version of a virtual machine or backup without taking up X time or space.

If we do a backup of a machine at some point and the server crashes, then we can restore this machine to a different server with the same settings and setup. We will just have to tweak one or two things, like the IP. Then, it is ready to go. This is not quite high availability. However, if we use the replication feature to make an exact copy of the machine, then we can tweak them to work together as active-active or active-passive. This can help us to save time because the deduplication is done automatically without errors and we have minimal changes to do.

I like also the feature where you back up a virtual machine, then it will run a startup and you can take a screenshot of the first few seconds of the bootup. This way, at a quick glance, we can determine the backup is bootable and whether the backup of the virtual machine will be functional or not. Sometimes testing the backup is something that we don't always do on a regular basis until we find out that something is broken. Then, we didn't know until it's too late. So, this feature is appreciated.

With the configuration of backups, there are a few things I would change with the UI. 

One thing that I reported with the backups: When there are accentuated characters in a path, then we can't restore documents into a folder. There is a bug with the restoration and restoring files with accentuated characters in the path. Hopefully, they have repaired this because otherwise we will restore files and find out that they are not there.

A little over a year.

It is pretty stable.

I have just two physical machines with five or six VMs each. It is not that big of a setup. From a scalability perspective, I don't know if it will be good or not, but I believe it will be.

There are three users of the solution: a VP of operations, someone who is a jack-of-all-trades, and myself. There is no one with a specific skill set for this. It is really easy to figure out.

The technical support has been good. They have been dedicated to resolving issues.

Vembu was the first solution of this type. This solution was recommended to us.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to install. There are not too many options and it was ready to go almost out-of-the-box. We have a really simple setup so the deployment took an hour or two. 

We have seen ROI based on confidence and time saved. We save a few hundred dollars a year.

We have the enterprise version with two server licenses.

Take a look at the pricing and licensing closely. When we installed the BDR disaster recovery server, which is the duplication of the backup data on one server onto a second one where the backup data resides, it was not clear that this DR server needed two other licenses. These licenses were to back up the copy of the first backup server that had two licenses for the two physical host that it was backing up in the first place. Moving files around to a second DR server, why would I need an extra two licenses? I don't know if it's to make money, but it was not very obvious and I had to abort the project from there because I didn't plan to pay for extra licenses to copy data of the first two physical servers. I also didn't understand why it was needed. Hopefully, they will improve the explanation in the documentation for this.

I compared different vendors' functionalities, our requirements, and price. We chose this solution because it was cheaper and easier to use than Veeam and other solutions of this type. Though they are not easy to compare as they all have different licensing models.

Make sure you have a clear view of your architecture and how you will be implementing it. Decide upfront which site will receive the backup and which site will do the deduplication of the backup's redundancy. As mentioned, I started to do some backups on the second office site and wanted to move the backups on to third site for disaster recovery, but I figured out that it would be better to install the backup server on the third site and the deduplication on the second site. However, just exchanging their roles was not that easy because I was missing licensing and backups were already running. I would recommend to ask questions, figure out the licensing model, what needs to be installed where, and their best practices. For example, if I have to do things again, I would do things differently.

I would give the product a seven (out of 10).

It has provided us with a value-added service for our customers, aiding us in becoming a one stop shop for all IT and Communication requirements.

The intuitive GUI, ease of use for doing any type of backup.

The Support for Exchange 2016 mailboxes, a daily report for all customers on their last backup (Current report misses some information)

The Backup solution has been very stable and any issues have been promptly addressed by the Vembu support team.

Customer Service:

Customer service is always excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is always excellent.

We switched to another solution only because vembu were discontinuing the product, glad to hear they continued it and we came back on board.

It was extremely simple to setup and we were working in no time at all.

We advise them to check out other solutions but we are very competitive. We license by server/application and storage allocation.

In-house.

It is between 15–30%

We advise them to check out other solutions, but we are very competitive. We license by server/application and storage allocation.