Unitrends Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

it_user753399

Technology Director at a non-tech company

Nov 15, 2017

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It saves time and pays for itself in one year

What is our primary use case?

Backup
Recovery

What is most valuable?

Ease of use.

How has it helped my organization?

It saves time.

What needs improvement?

All things with a computer chip.

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Unitrends

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For how long have I used the solution?

Two years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

None.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

None.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

None.

How are customer service and support?

Outstanding.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Vendor provided backup service. Unitrends product paid for itself in one year.

How was the initial setup?

I had excellent help from my reseller.

What about the implementation team?

A vendor team did the implementation.

What was our ROI?

One year.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Affordable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, Veeam.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user759144

IT Manager at a marketing services firm with 201-500 employees

Nov 13, 2017

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It provides instant recovery for a solution that backups all the servers on our network

What is our primary use case?

Backup of all servers on our network.

What is most valuable?

Provides instant recovery.

How has it helped my organization?

Our ability to backup quickly.

What needs improvement?

None.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Tech support helped us with the deployment. They were awesome.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is rock solid.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No.

How are customer service and technical support?

It is a 10 out of 10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Arcserve.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. We received help once we were up.

What about the implementation team?

In-house.

What was our ROI?

Unknown.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Licensing and renewals are a tad expensive.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Buyer's Guide

Unitrends

November 2024

Free Report: Unitrends Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Unitrends. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.

it_user759144

IT Manager at a marketing services firm with 201-500 employees

Oct 24, 2017

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Cuts down on the amount of time spent verifying backups

What is most valuable?

Backup to disk
Ability to restore to virtual machines.

How has it helped my organization?

It cuts down on the amount of time spent verifying backups.

What needs improvement?

Renewal issues: It should have the ability to do year-by-year for multiple years.

For how long have I used the solution?

Three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Any issues that come up are handled by tech support and our onboarder.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is rock solid.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Awesome support.

Technical Support:

Awesome support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Arcserve. We switched to a new solution due to usability.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

In-house.

What was our ROI?

Two years.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Not applicable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No.

What other advice do I have?

It is a great system.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user760353IT Director at a government

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May 4, 2018

Nice dashboard email each morning with overnight results, simple and easy to use.

it_user752442

Director of Information Technology at a legal firm with 201-500 employees

Oct 18, 2017

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

Pros and Cons

"Backup/archive to multiple locations."

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

Reliable DR
Backup/archive to multiple locations
Excellent support

What needs improvement?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

None.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What about the implementation team?

I actually implemented most of it by myself.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user752400

Senior Network Administrator at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 17, 2017

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We went from tape backups to hard disk backups. The restores have been a lot quicker.

What is most valuable?

Loving the new SLA Policy feature. Recovery is very quick.

How has it helped my organization?

We went from tape backups to hard disk backups using Unitrends. The restores have been a lot quicker.

What needs improvement?

Stabilizing SQL database backups: They are way too sensitive and I am having to constantly fix SQL level backups.

For how long have I used the solution?

Three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

None. Easy deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Symantec NetBackup.

How was the initial setup?

It was actually very straightfoward

What about the implementation team?

It was in-house with the assistance of Unitrends tech support.

What was our ROI?

I've already received my ROI through many man hours being saved going from tape to hard disk.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Consider the Enterprise Plus license, it adds a few extra analytics and reporting that will provide you with a little more insight into your RPO and RTOs.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Dell solution, ExaGrid, and a little bit of Veeam.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user98646

Virtualization Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

May 7, 2015

Incremental backups are quicker than differential backups and can thus be done more frequently but the Windows agent must be version 7.5 or higher.

A couple of weeks ago Unitrends announced their latest release of Unitrends Enterprise Backup, namely version 7.5. The last couple of days I’ve been able to try this new version and I must say I’m pretty impressed by all new features and the ease of use of this new version. First let’s start with the feature list and dive in to some of these further:

CloudHook for archiving to your cloud storage provider.
Navigation grouping for easy management of clients and virtual machines.
Support for Exchange incremental backups.
Support for multiple SQL restores.
New Policies report and Storage Footprint report.
System performance enhancements, including faster backups, faster replication, and faster VMware inventory scan.

CloudHook

With Unitrends CloudHook you have the possibility to archive your backups in the cloud. In earlier days we had to put our long-term backups on tape, because having the data that was been backuped in the same datacenter was no option. Getting it on tape and then moving it to another location ensured us of data salvation in case of a major event. With cloud storage becoming more and more available, companies are looking for this option to archive their backups. With Unitrends CloudHook you have the possibility to archive your backups into the cloud in a very efficient way. At the time of writing there are 3 cloud storage solutions supported by UEB 7.5 namely:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Google Cloud Storage
Rackspace Cloud Files

Navigation Grouping

With Navigation grouping UEB 7.5 making backups of multiple VM’s or physical servers in an organized manner is easy. Group servers together to make navigation, monitoring, backup, restore, archiving and reporting much easier. The following list of items can be grouped together:

Physical Clients like Windows and Linux Servers
VMware VM’s
vApps
VMware templates
Resource pools
HyperV VM’s

Removing these groups is just as easy as creating them, and it will return the interface to the original state.

xchange incremental backup support

UEB 7.5 provides the possibility to make incremental backups of your Exchange Database. This has a couple of benefits:

Incremental backups are quicker than differential backups and can thus be done more frequently. This benefit lays in the fact that a differential backup includes all changes since the full backup (it does not change the Archive flag) while incremental backups only backup the changes since the last incremental (it changes the archive flag)
Another benefit of incremental backups is the fact that log after completing a successful incremental, unneeded transaction log files are automatically truncated, freeing space on the Exchange server.

To use the Unitrends Exchange incremental backups the following requirements must be met:

The Unitrends appliance must be running version 7.5 at least.
The Windows agent must be version 7.5 or higher.
Differential and incremental backups cannot be in the same schedule.
A full backup must be in the schedule. The incremental forever strategy is not supported.

Multiple SQL restores support

Now you can restore multiple SQL databases with a single click. You can also create custom folders of protected servers and virtual machines – significantly reducing the clicks needed to manage protected assets. The only limitations on this is the Windows limitation which is 6 simultaneous restores can run at the same time

To use this feature you must meet the following requirements:

The Unitrends appliance must be running version 7.5 at least.
The Windows agent must be version 7.5 or higher.
Databases must be restored to the original SQL instance and name.

New reporting capabilities

With the UEB 7.5 release a couple of new reports are available, which will help you to produce better and more efficient reports on your UEB environment:

Policies report. This report contains information about the general data protection policies applied to your systems, including systems protected, retention settings, schedules, data included or excluded from backup, and backup type. This report, along with the Schedule History report, may be used to assist in satisfying regulatory compliance audits
Storage Footprint report. This report needs to run on replication targets to determine the amount of physical storage consumed by each replicating source system

System performance enhancements

UEB 7.5 features the following performance enhancements:

As UEB 7.5 now uses hardware assisted encryption leveraging the AES instruction set on the processor as well enhanced space reclamation algorithms provides for much faster backups.
Pipelining optimizations, hardware assisted encryption and improvements made to the algorithms that manage the replication queue provide a significant increase in faster replication.
In release 7.5 UEB provides a much faster VMware inventory scan for all environments.
With all the new features and improvements UEB 7.5 provides a smaller backup window and increased retention.

Arjan’s view

With all these new features and (performance) improvements as well as the fusion between two great companies (Unitrends and PHD Virtual), and their products, UEB 7.5 is a feature rich product which I can easily promote to all my customers. With the Unitrends team growing larger and larger and international the support for the Unitrends products is great. With backup and recovery on a modern way but with the possibility to leverage old and new infrastructures and features the UEB 7.5 is an awesome release which shows that Unitrends is a company to keep in mind.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Greg G

Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Jul 1, 2019

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Reliable solution that offers great predictive analytics and reporting

Pros and Cons

"The predictive analytics are great and the reporting is awesome."

"If the interface could be less complex, it is would be great."

What is our primary use case?

Unitrends is a hardware-based solution that we use for backup and disaster recovery. We are trying it out to get it into our market to sell.

How has it helped my organization?

With Unitrends we can spin up devices into a VM in about five minutes' time. The disaster recovery time is very quick. Even while we are busy fixing hardware, we still have a running machine. That minimizes the loss of service. Something that usually took two hours now takes only five minutes on the server.

What is most valuable?

The feature I find most valuable is the hardware functionality because it's reliable and it's got predictive analytics and hardware failure. The predictive analytics are great and the reporting is awesome. It is a very reliable product.

Unitrends offers a lot of services and that allows us to seed devices. What we do is to create a backup on site, write it to a disc, courier it to Unitrends and they seed it to the cloud. So you don't need to copy terabytes of data over a line. That's very handy.

It is all very dependent on what the customer is buying. They can buy a hardware solution or a software solution. We don't particularly like working with a software solution because we don't trust underlying hardware and hypervisors and those type of things.

I will compare Unitrends to a Swiss army knife back up. It offers a lot of ways to do all sorts of things.

What needs improvement?

If the interface could be less complex, it is would be great. It's not the easiest to get around and to work with. Someone with a technical background won't have a problem with it, but new people might struggle with the interface complexity.

I would like to see more support for the different major cloud vendors and more focus on the desktop so that I can give a client a single solution for all of their backup requirements. I don't like selling two or three different backup products to cover various needs. I want to be able to provide my client with a single solution from a single vendor.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been working with the latest version of Unitrends for about two years now.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

If you do proper planning, the program is very stable. I think Unitrends is designed for a data center and servers rather than for end-user backups.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Unitrends is very scalable. You can basically plug in a new device and add more devices as you scale.

Unitrends is not extensively being used here in South Africa but we have a lot of plans to increase usage of the product. It's being extensively used overseas, and it has already appeared in Gartner and the visionary side of their graph and it has a lot of usage in Europe and the US. We're trying to increase the market in South Africa dramatically.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support is brilliant. Unitrends provides what they call a white glove service, where they monitor the devices. They will send people out to either do repairs should something go wrong, or they will send a new device out. Then it's a matter of plugging it in because they do a lot of the maintenance work themselves.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've used many solutions throughout my career in technical support. We switched to Unitrends because it works and we have started selling Unitrends because it works. It's reliable and it's a very trustworthy system.

I used Backup Exec and other solutions before, but I have found that a lot of them can't be trusted.

We went through a long period of evaluation before choosing Unitrends as a product.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is pretty straightforward if the planning is done well. It is very important to realize that it isn't just a plug and play thing. You must do proper planning and get your capacities right. You can't just do a lackadaisical implementation. So it is not straightforward, but it's very well sorted out by the time it goes into production. They do provide templates for the setup and essentially they give you an entire project plan.

The time it takes to deploy the program will depend on the size of the customer. A small client's deployment will be very fast. But you have to plan first and have to look at the client's capacity, how much they're backing up and how often they're backing up. Then you can cut their RTO's and RPO's down. You must include the business planning, what their objectives are, and then fit everything within that framework. If you try to miss a few steps and wing it, the program won't work for you.

What about the implementation team?

We are vendors for Unitrends. We use Unitrends themselves as part of the deployment and they're very good.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Licensing costs appear high for hardware devices and software, when compared to other solutions. But in the long run, they're not, because you get free hardware replacement after three or five years. It's not an easy comparison, but it is more cost effective in the long run than most other solutions. You don't need new licensing every year.

For hardware devices, you pay a per seat or per call licensing structure. There are no other hidden costs like you have with a lot of other products. The upfront licensing is very simple to understand.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Most of our customers use VM and Backup Exec, but because we are resellers of Unitrends, we also use it from time to time. For end-user backups, we use a product called CloudBerry, which we have yet to actually sell into the market here in South Africa. We focus mainly on the data center and server market.

What other advice do I have?

My advice would be to follow the recommendation when you do the planning and installation. If you don't you're going to run into trouble. For what it's designed for, I will rate this product a nine and a half out of ten. It is pretty much the best product out there for what it claims to do. They've lived up to just about every promise they have made on marketing and on their website.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller.