BDRSuite Backup & Replication Reviews

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.

Backing up virtual machines, we use it for Windows Hyper-V platform in one data center, but we've also got future plans for a VMware Hypervisor platform in another data center. So thinking ahead, we chose Vembu.

It hasn't improved things, per se. It's an essential service, done automatically. I would say it is an essential backup system that matches the alternative solutions at the moment in a relatively cost-effective way.

The automated backup of multiple virtual machines. We can back up two hypervisors, one is Microsoft Hyper-V and the other one is VMware Hypervisor.

It is very easy, unless you know exactly what you're doing, to corrupt the virtual machines and they get locked up. Just brief detail: When you are creating a system, if you don't have absolutely every other little background processes in place, it creates Snapshots of the virtual machines. Once it does that, it then won't be able to have a backup. From that point on you have to destroy the virtual machine, which is completely counterproductive on a large system. There is a fundamental flaw in the setup that can be very dangerous, potentially. So that needs to be avoided; whoever writes the software for doing that needs to make sure that that cannot happen.

I have fed that back to the developers. I don't know whether they're going to make that change, but they can't put that responsibility onto customers. It's their software that needs to be able to not allow that to happen. I've not had any response to say, "Yes, we'll do it." So that's a little bit of a fault as well. When we do give feedback we don't get any commitment. Like this survey, we're being asked the questions, but when we give feedback, we don't actually get any response at all.

When it's backing up, it's okay. We've used it to restore the system and that restore system worked. We get an email report on various operations, so we know if something has failed or not. It's operating fine.

We've not encountered any trouble with scalability.

Their tech support is okay, but they don't respond in time to sort out the problem. We sorted it out ourselves. We fed back the answer. There wasn't any thank you. There wasn't any acknowledgment. There wasn't even any appreciation of what we'd actually done, something like, "Yeah, yeah, you shouldn't have done that." That kind of thing. Very basic support. There is a willingness to help and respond, but in actually solving the problem, they're not very good at all.

Then, once we did solve it, there was no understanding of what had been done, so it's at that level that it is lacking. This issue was over New Year's time. I was actually on holiday in India. I had to waste a whole day rebuilding a system from a corrupt backup. And again, no support from the Vembu guys, at all. Once we showed them what had been done, again, no acknowledgment that they'd safeguard this in the future.

It has been several months now and I'm not in a position to be chasing them to improve the product in that way. So it's still there, in potential, for future Vembu customers to hit the problem that we had and they might not be as tolerant or be able to fix it. We're an IT company ourselves, so we do understand the nature of the software that they're running and the problems, but there are major flaws in the design at set up time.

We haven't actually switched. We do use Microsoft Azure backup systems. We've used our own online backup systems. We've used in-built data center backup solutions a well, so there are a number of solutions. All of them have their weak points. The Vembu one is working and it's stable.

We had problems, initially in setting it up. There was a major bug and the backup process, it corrupted one of our virtual machines which was a live customer system. That wasn't very good. Now that has been sorted and we know how to avoid it, but at the beginning, it wasn't a good system. It has been fixed and it has been working fine since.

It was supposed to be straightforward but it caused major technical issues that were difficult to fix. They were actually unfixable, the problems. We had to basically destroy live production systems.

Pricing is a good value.

Licensing seems okay. I suppose the more volume you put through the system, it would be good to have a volume licensing discount. We're a managed IT service provider, so we're backing up not just our own systems but all our clients'. In that regard, as we grow, we're putting business through Vembu. There is not any specific partner incentive at all. So that would be nice to see.

Microsoft Azure. I can't remember the others but there were a few; the data center ones, but I haven't got specific names. The in-built ones in VMware.

When you do a search on Google about half a dozen pop up and we looked at some of them. With some of them were put off by their business models. So even before we evaluated them, their business models weren't acceptable. The nice thing about Vembu is the subscription, on a monthly basis. It fits into our business models.

I would tell others looking into implementing this solution exactly what steps need to be done in the setup. I've actually documented it, and I've passed that on to the Vembu guys. Take that, and make sure that things are set up very clearly, not, "There you go, it's very straightforward, it'll take you five minutes." It's not like that at all. The marketing of the setup is so misleading. It can cause a lot of problems. They need to be more honest in the way things need to be set up. That would be okay, that doesn't put people off when you have to go through a process. But just saying it's straightforward and it's simple is a bit of a lie, especially if it causes a lot of problems. So there needs to be more documentation on exactly what to set up in what order, and how to do it and what not to do.

Regarding technical support, sometimes, if you pick the wrong time of day to get through you get this constant "We value your business, we're busy at the moment..." and you can be on the phone for ages because it gets redirected to America. You get the feeling that they're not actually busy, they just have some automated lady giving you a message. Again, that engenders mistrust in the technology. It needs to be not advertised as 24/7. It needs to be advertised with the specific hours that support can be provided. That would help a lot, not just saying 24/7 and then not actually providing it.

It goes to America, but it is actually answered in India. It's all confusing. If it's 3 o'clock in India, we understand that they'll be asleep, so why not say we operate at these times, and people will understand that, rather than pretending redirect to an American number, where you're expecting somebody to pick up the phone. But they're picking it up from India at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's forced us to be hanging on to the phone for a long time, while nobody has got any intention of picking up the phone.

In terms of my rating of the solution, I have to do so on two levels. The first is the implementation and that would be a two out of 10. It was bad. But in terms of once it's operating, I would give it a nine.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

We use it for backup copies of key virtual servers in our company.

Fortunately, we have not had to recover lost data. However, it is reassuring to know that we can recover lost data, if needed.

The most valuable features are ease of setup and configuration.

I have not been impressed by the data compression of the backup images. They seem to take up nearly as much space on the backup drive as they do on the server.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not faced any challenges with its ability to  scale.

Their technical support is very good to work with, as they are able to propose alternate solutions to problems that work well for us.

We did not previously use a different solution. Vembu was selected after reviewing, then trying several different products.

The initial setup was straightforward and well-documented.

We were able to take advantage of a promotional pricing campaign. 

I do not know how often Vembu offers the promotional pricing campaign, but it can be cost advantageous.

In addition to Vembu, we evaluated Veeam, Unitrends, and Virten as alternative solutions.

Verify that you can restore a virtual machine (VM) from its backup and ensure the notification of backup results (success or fail) is readily available.