Unitrends Reviews

We used Unitrends for Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster, VMWare ESXi Clusters, physical servers, virtual servers, SQL databases, and Exchange DAGs databases.

We consolidated down from several disparate backup applications to Unitrends and AvePoint.

The daily reports that showed Red, Green, Yellow status for each asset/server/database protected.  Simple and easy to use for daily logging, providing assurance all was well.  The main dashboard screen contained a wealth of useful concise information: protect/unprotected, replication stats, current jobs running.

It seems like Unitrends moved away from enterprise customer engagement and moved more towards the managed service provider market. I'm familiar with that market because I do that type of work on the side. That's great, but that's a whole different market and avenue from the enterprise backup market; how they interact is totally different as well. I don't know what happened, but their customer engagement went completely downhill on their sales side. You just can't do that.

I don't know what happened, but I looked at their cloud product and it just looks like an IaaS implementation of their on-premise product. Cloud products really need to be engineered to be cloud-aware. I haven't looked at it for several months now, but at that time, I wanted it to work out, it just did not seem like it was cloud-aware in terms of being able to have tiered storage and different capabilities that I wanted.

We used Unitrends August, 2015 until July, 2020. We did make the switch to another vendor.

All I can tell you is my friends made fun of me because of how often I had to call technical support.

It's not easy to scale it. At some point, it requires a forklift upgrade. So that's not very conducive to scaling well; at least for what we were using it for.

The technical support was awesome. They were very good people to work with and I liked them a lot, but the product needed some work.

We used a lot of different solutions before Unitrends. We had so many different solutions that we were using to meet our needs and Unitrends was able to help us bring that down to just Unitrends and DocAve. Before all of that, we were using a combination of Symantec Backup Exec, Dell AppAssure, Dell Quest vRanger, and a little bit of Metalogics — there were just too many. It was painful trying to work with all those. With Unitrends we were able to get down to just Unitrends and AvePoint.

The main reason we left Unitrends to go with Rubrik was due to its lack of a clear cloud unification and direction. For several years I liked the product in terms of their support and willingness to keep it going. It was very cross-platform compatible in the number of things that it could back up — way more than I ever needed. We had licensed it in August of 2015 when they were selling it as software; however, they no longer sell it as plain software anymore; unless you're talking about their cloud products. I just felt like it got to the point where the company was no longer responsive.

We told them we were getting ready to evaluate new products and wanted them to submit a plan as we were going to start over with them, but we never heard anything back from them. I blame that on Kaseya (who bought them), which I feel bad about that because I really liked the company. I really liked the people. I really liked the support. I really liked the product. It was the first time I had ever seen a very good reporting system that provided a daily report that I call a "traffic light"  report.  That's why I was so in love with it — that report made my job a lot easier. Before choosing Rubrik, we looked at several other products: Zerto, Cohesity, DELL IDPA, Arcserve, Veeam, and several other solutions, we had to weed through hundreds of reports and carefully read through them to determine whether they were successful or not — how much they backed up and so forth.

Whereas with Unitrends, you just got an indicator — red, green, or yellow: green means everything is good; red means you definitely need to look at it; yellow means look at it tomorrow and make sure it's not yellow tomorrow unless you know it's okay for it to be yellow. That was the beauty of Unitrends that I really liked. Cohesity does have that feature, which is a nice thing about Cohesity. Rubrik Compass hopefully will also be included in the future as part of their product. When you're looking at hundreds of backup jobs every morning, and you want to know how they performed, it's too much to try to read dozens if not hundreds of reports and lines. I'd rather see red, green, or yellow.

Rubrik and Unitrends both give you seven days at a view. So whatever day you were looking at, you always had the previous seven days. For that alone, the three products — Rubrik, Cohesity, and Unitrends — were wonderful for my needs. I Almost bought Zerto. I kept begging Zerto to show me their reports and I'd actually almost committed to them. Finally, I got tired of waiting; I then configured the reports on my own and they were awful. Zerto makes a fine product as well, but their reporting is awful. I hate to say it, but that's a big deal for me — daily reports that make sense and are easy to understand and use.

Because we deployed Unitrends on our own hardware, setup and configuration was not trivial.  And, for that same reason - upgrades were also complicated as Unitrends updates were built looking supporting a limited hardware set.

No.  We built our own hardware and just had Unitrends support to help with the software install and configuration.

Unitrends licensing depended on the number of CPUs you had, simple.

It was competitive with other products. I think it was around $1000 a CPU a year. We have about 40 CPUs so It was costing us about $40,000 a year — that was our renewal price. I think the initial price may have been more. We didn't buy their hardware. We built our own and deployed their solution on our hardware, which was a blessing and a curse.

ArcServe, Veeam, Zerto, BackupExec, vRanger, vmPro, AppAssure, Metalogix.

If you go Unitrends, then buy everything from them. I don't even think you even have a choice anymore. After us and another big client, they told me they did away with the idea of selling their software. They only sell solutions that are their hardware and their software. You can't install it on your own equipment anymore. Also, beware of the forklift upgrades that are required at a certain point.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Unitrends a rating of seven.

We primarily use Unitrends to assist when a file or server level restore/backup is needed. We perform nightly backups of all servers, as well as a monthly backup to disk, which is stored offsite.

Unitrends has helped us cut down the time that it takes to restore a server to its original configuration. Before, we only had the file structure backing up on a nightly basis and were utilizing bare metals. 

Unitrends has drastically cut down on our restore time.

The scheduling and event viewer is easy to use and a helpful item when setting up new servers to be backed up. It determines what errors are being generated as a result of an issue.

The amount of updates which are being released. We were running 9.2 for the longest time when 10 came out. We were advised to upgrade, then two weeks later, we were told to wait. Since version 10 came out, there have been multiple versions released for Unitrends. Updates should be limited to two or three a year, focusing more on quality instead of a rushed bug release.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

One of the best features is the customer service. When submitting online, the techs are quick to return my call and are very patient and helpful in answering all my questions. 

I recently had an issue backing up a specific server (and without sending an email), the tech emailed me at 4 AM and provided a solution to the error which was generated.

Since I have been with the company, we have always used Unitrends.

I do not know.

You should be aware how much the monthly costs are to use, what the initial costs for hardware are, and what the options to expand are, if needed.

We did not evaluate anyone else.

Less headaches to worry about backups. 99% of the time, I don't have to touch it. Set up the jobs and let it go. 1% is the setup of new backups and verification the new backups work.

• Backup and restore
• Replication to Forever Cloud
• Tech support

Follow up for the DRaaS service setup. I'm still waiting to schedule a DRaaS test after upgrading several months ago.

Yes. I was backing up too much information. Changed from doing two physical appliances, one local, and one remote to two local and a Forever Cloud for remote. This doubled our storage space for backups and solved the problem.

No.

Customer Service:

Good customer service. No problems with my sales rep.

Technical Support:

High level of tech support. The best part of their service. They keep following up until they know everything is right.

I've used physical tape, NetBackup, Arcserve IT, Backup Exec, and high-speed tape caching. It's great going right to disk.

I didn't do the initial setup. However, when we converted the second remote to a local support, they guided me through the entire process.

We implemented straight through Unitrends Support

More sleep!

When you purchase initially, get into the program which gives replacement hardware for free when you renew your support agreement. It makes the renewal down the road so much easier to cost justify.

Datto.

It performs as a backup product.

The whole appliance needs to be more resilient. It lost our database, and that is something that cannot happen. If the data was written and managed a little better, we would not lose our entire backup. A bit more thought needs to be put into the process.

There are some questions as to how safely they are storing backup data. We had an issue about a year ago, but it actually ended up wiping our entire backup history, because one of the databases got corrupted, and we couldn't recover the backup data. Six to seven years of backup data just disappeared. So, obviously we weren't too happy. It's one of the primary reasons we're looking at the market and have gone down a different route for backups, essentially.

I also think there should be a lesser focus on the physical appliance, which was virtualized. I'm willing to look at it from the ground up and go actually a bit more resiliency, we don't want to lose the entire database because it took a snapshot of the appliance. This is a pretty common thing. We unravel all this data that's backed up if we need to collaborate.

It's fairly stable, it runs, it does a backup like you said. Things don't tend to go wrong until either VM upgrades or Unitrends breaks with an update. In terms of that it just carries on. It does its job, that's the main thing.

It's scalable to a point. Yes, it is quite scalable.

The technical support team is pretty good, actually. In all fairness to them, they are good. It is not their fault that their products are not functional in all aspects. But, from the support perspective, they did work quite hard to get things working in our favor. They did try their best. We cannot fault the support team for a problem with the product, itself.

I was not involved with the initial setup. It was inherited by me. 

Always look at your backups strategy, and what your RPO and RTO are. Also, understand your infrastructure and the risks involved, including how the backup works.

If you are a large organization or corporation, with multiple sites, you can replicate the data from one Unitrends device to anoter Unitrends divide appliance. Then, this is definitely a solution for you. But, if you are a smaller corporation or organization, and you are worried about your backups, Unitrends may not be your best product choice.

I have no advice about the pricing of the product.

I inherited the product, so I did not comparison shop or evaluate other products.

It hasn't improved our backup because of the signal comeback with their solutions. They purchased RDR, but we don't know whether, I believe there's new functionality now in the current version, but it's not quite there yet. But there's still the pitfall there. If the database gets corrupted you lost access to your data unless it's stored under the appliance. So, you are basically doubling up on your data storage. So, I can't really say much more than that.

I've been deploying it for most of my clients because it comes in an appliance model and supports any operating system, including legacy operating systems. Some customers prefer the appliance model rather than just getting the software and worrying about integrating it.

It's been useful for our customers who rely on legacy systems and fail to find backup solutions that are compatible with their legacy systems. For example, in the industrial sector, we have people relying on a system that's running on Windows 2000 for 20 years. Nobody really supports these operating systems these days, and only a very few vendors do that.

Unitrends really has cross-compatibility and a broad area of support for various operating system backups. I like the fact that you can recover the VMs inside the appliance. For example, they're basically running this appliance on a Linux-based distribution, and they're spinning off KVM virtual machines inside. The customer has downtime to his advantage. He can absolutely spin-off some VMs from inside the backup appliance itself to start production or close instantly or as soon as possible.

Unitrends has a unique point in deduplication because it has global deduplication, and it can help make backup sizes much smaller than the software they're using. Because it deduplicates from a storage area and has a feature to recover a VM inside the appliance.

Their technical support is also good. It's actually one of the selling points, and we show the customer that their support is reliable.

becoming software defined rather than appliance based oriented, establishing alllainces with major oem vendors as that opens flexibility on HW

We've been using Unitrends for about a year and a half.

Unitrends is pretty much stable. It's been around in the market for quite some time. It's not very famous around here in the region of Saudi Arabia, but it's a well-established backup company, and they've been well-established in the market. It's pretty safe to say that it's stable.

Unitrends is not really enterprise-ready. It can scale, and there's a lot you can do with it, but it's more suitable for small and medium appliance-based backup solution models.

Technical support was great at the time. They had this chat feature, and they are happy to support you. That's actually one of the selling points, and we show the customer that their support is reliable.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. There's a good interface where you can log in, and you can start deploying it in your business and start backing up the environment and the appliance. In terms of configuration, it's straightforward. The nightmare is racking and stacking the appliance. It's pretty heavy.

The deployment time is relative to the customer's environment. Some customer environments will be very smooth. It won't take much time to deploy and backup the environment. Some customer environments will have some bottlenecks, whether it be on the network or the storage level. Some things can be deployed in minutes, but the challenges are to be faced on site, and sometimes it can cause delays for as long as a month.

We integrate this solution for our customers. It's a 2-person job. We go on-site and implement this solution. You just need to have product training and learn how to deploy it from the portal. You can just go on site and start deploying it. I mean, that really relies on the customer side. If he's an enterprise customer, then you need more than one person. It would help if you had a team to deploy it.

I wouldn't recommend this product to potential customers because it's an appliance-based model, and you'll be locked in with that vendor. You'll have to pay whatever that vendor demands for the hardware. It's always best to go with a software-based solution because it scales, and basically, it's flexible for you to use compared to the hardware-based model.

I heard that they have software now, and you can deploy a software-based model and work with that. You don't need to tie yourself to their hardware. The other thing is the fact that the hardware becomes an area of support. 

For example, I have one customer in the industrial sector. Three years ago, I sold them an appliance, and right now, that hardware is at the end-of-life stage. He needs to purchase new hardware unless he has some agreement with Unitrends, which they call a "pledge agreement." You pay more when you buy the appliance, but in exchange, when you renew their support, if the hardware reaches the end-of-life stage, they'll basically replace it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Unitrends a 7.

We have been able to move completely away from using tape and robocopy for backup efforts.

• Reliable DR
• Backup/archive to multiple locations
• Excellent support

Making the seeding process more accessible and easier to understand. Also, make more of the undocumented best practices easier to find

When we first moved to v10, we did have issues with restores. Support jumped right in and found the issue, and published a bug fix, this took care of the issue.

None.

Customer Service:

Excellent. I like that I can chat directly with them for simple issues, and can also reach out to higher level engineers for the more difficult issues.

Technical Support:

Excellent, see previous answer.

We used Zerto, which was not able to do file-level restores for any volume larger than 2TB.

It was straightforward in the initial setup, but a bit more complex in the tuning and tweaking.

I actually implemented most of it by myself.

Make sure you do the homework to size the solution properly. Buy the Enterprise Plus licensing if you can afford it.

We had a pretty solid backup platform before. I wouldn't say Unitrends made anything better, besides ditching Symantec's per TB licensing model and saving us a lot of money.

Being an appliance-based solution, we were able to migrate backup solutions without having to purchase a lot of hardware separately.

Support is great for small simple issues, but anything more difficult, it is hard to get good resolutions without having to badger them and their management. I think maybe Unitrends' support teams are too small for the size of their customer base and numbers of incidents.

Issues with one appliance having disk-related issues happens often. There were many issues with this one appliance (with different causes). Another appliance is habitually having issues with archive times to Unitrends Archive device.

I would like one management console for a whole environment that works quickly. It can be done, however anything you look up slows queries down because you might be searching multiple backup appliances at once.

Customer Service:

Like any other company, sales will tell you almost anything, but the real proof is when you get it in your environment for a test drive.

Technical Support:

Technical support has not been very helpful when there are complex issues. It is sometimes difficult to find someone who can answer questions the right way. I have had tickets that have changed hands, and each person claims to have fixed the issue while there are multiple reasons given for the problem.

Symantec Net Backup: It was too costly.

Initial setup was not difficult, but did require planning.

We implemented through a partner, but much of the work was done by my own team.

Bacula, Rubrik (I think it was too new at that point), and Dell.