Share your experience using Datto SIRIS

The use cases for Datto SIRIS that we set up are that we back up all emails for 365, certain devices such as servers and data stores that are high priority. We ensure all of those are backed up, and also any individual workstations that are necessary for business continuity are also backed up.

Datto SIRIS helps reduce time as applicable to showing images could be recovered and systems spun up. Whenever we've done disaster recovery testing to show that it works, we actually create a parallel system and go and do a disaster recovery scenario on that parallel system.

The feature I like the most about Datto SIRIS is the ability to go into the system and let's say somebody has deleted an email from three months ago and they suddenly forgot they need it really bad. The ability for the system to go into the OST file from the dates or within a date range—and this is not just with the email, but with any files or applications—to go within a date range and locate what is needed and be able to recover it at the most recent backup recovery point within that time frame.

The ability to quickly and easily recover data at a micro level instead of having to do a giant recovery at a macro level where you're recovering an entire data store when you're only looking for one file is one of the great things I've found is its ability to be very granular in what you want to find.

When it comes to ransomware recovery, Datto SIRIS has come in clutch, which is the best way I could put it. In my professional experience of well over 15 years, at least 10 times Datto SIRIS has been able to entirely recover to a hardware level of recovery systems and save probably a week of downtime. The most recent one I can think of was with Datto SIRIS, the small version. We had two servers online at a customer who got ransomware, which locked everything up, and we had that customer back up and running on similar hardware for their servers by the open of business the next morning. It takes recovery from days to hours on a small to medium business.

Inverse Chain Technology seems to go faster because the newest saved state is treated as the authority in the situation. That way if there's any issues, rolling back is much easier than it would be if you did not have the inverse data. It allows for rollback to be done in a more efficient manner.

The effectiveness of Datto SIRIS in ransomware recovery is fantastic. I would say it's the best, hands down. The amount of time it takes to get the upload back onto a system with a clean image, and there is a localized device, a localized Datto device, within a local network is nothing else competes with it right now.

For the smaller Datto SIRIS devices that are made for backing up one or maybe two different machines, adding more RAM and giving it a better CPU would be phenomenal. Sometimes when dealing with entry-level Datto SIRIS products, you face an issue depending on how much storage there is on there when it's trying to parse through all of the data. It takes a while, and when it comes to data recovery, time is everything.

Datto SIRIS should remove the ability to set it up as a NAS-based file share operation system. It seems counterintuitive for something that is made for immutable storage that is walled off so that it can't be destroyed to be allowed to be a local centralized file share that individuals have access to. This seems to be begging for a mishap.

Datto SIRIS will require some maintenance when the hard drive gets past 50% capacity, which is Datto's statement on the capacity. You should never use past 50% of the storage locally. Then you have to reach out to Datto directly to get an external hard drive to transfer files to send off the data for it to be shot up to the cloud. We've had a couple of instances of devices not uploading to the cloud because either they were too full or there were failures in certain parts of the file upload to the cloud, which put it into a circle of death where it just kept trying to do the same thing over and over again and had to request assistance from Datto in those situations. Otherwise, if you store it in a dusty cabinet, you have to spray it with a computer duster every once in a while.

I've been using Datto SIRIS in my career since approximately 2015.

Some of the early Datto SIRIS devices had instability. I haven't had any issues or seen any issues with the ones over the past four or five years.

Datto SIRIS is scalable, but each time you have to get a new product. The older Datto SIRIS, such as the SIRIS 3, is not as scalable, but it varies on the level of Datto SIRIS that you get. It is scalable to the point that how many drives can you put into the individual device and what is the maximum size drive, what is the maximum amount of RAM that each device will have. You can get a Datto SIRIS 3 with 128 gigs of RAM and 6 terabyte individual disks, but you can also do a newer one that has eight disks. It depends on what device you get because you're basing it off of different hardware. The original equipment manufacturer hardware is either a Dell or another server manufacturer. You can expand it as much as you can expand it, but if you get the Datto SIRIS 3, it's not going to be as good as the enterprise version of Datto SIRIS 5. You're stuck with the hardware you have, which is one of the big issues.

We've had to contact Datto support to get them to send hard drives when the device goes over 50% or is full. We've had to contact them for spinning up virtualized machines, to get virtualized machines and bandwidth increase for spinning up virtualized machines in ransomware and disaster scenarios.

I would rate the support at a nine out of ten compared to all other support. I don't give anybody a ten.

Positive

I've used everything from tape backups on an AS/400 green screen back before we had mice on the system, so it was just the keyboard, and we actually used solid tapes to back up and would go and take the tapes home with us to the use of imaging services that literally take a full image of a device and store it on the cloud through dropdown distribution. I've used Veeam a lot.

The deployment of Datto SIRIS is easy.

It requires one person, one engineer to deploy it. As long as they have all the correct credentials and access management, they can deploy it with every single thing that's needed, including online email backup, M365, Microsoft 365, everything of that nature, and set the scheduling to when they need. Depending on the size, if we're talking about one small entity that's doing their O365 and one server backing it up, as soon as you get that onto the network localized, it shouldn't take any more than two hours to have it set up and ingesting data.

The pricing offered to MSPs for Datto SIRIS is okay, but the ability for MSPs, their upcharge when it comes down to small, medium businesses, SMB clients, is actually putting Datto out of the market for SMB clients, especially with the ability to purchase Dropbox and all these cloud-based storage solutions now. Having a local device is fantastic, and then having that device back up locally and also send backups to a cloud-based system is fantastic. The only issue is that a lot of people are looking to cut costs, especially right now, and Datto has priced itself out of one of the largest parts of the U.S. market.

One-Click Disaster Recovery is a new feature that I'm referring to is the immutable backups where the backups, you can actually go in and do a complete restore either hardware-level restore or down to files and file folders. On a server, I spun up two new servers because we were getting ready to implement new servers anyway. So we had them there, spun those up with the new license keys from Microsoft, and then went on Datto SIRIS, pointed Datto SIRIS to the IPs of the new servers, and to the shared data store that I'd set up on them, and recovered all of the data from before the ransomware had hit to the new servers and was able to build out the FSMO roles, everything, off of the recovered information.

The one-click recovery is something new that I haven't seen. One-click disaster recovery cleanup and one-click Cloud VLAN are features I'm not familiar with from my previous experience. When I was using Datto SIRIS, there wasn't a one-click Cloud VLAN. We had to go through spin up, spin up the server image in Datto Cloud, have it start handing out DHCP from Datto Cloud, and then reassign all of the IP addresses locally once the server image was spun up in the cloud. So there was no one-click. It was manual. Hearing that it's now one-click and it'll do that is nice, especially taking into account if a network has server hard down and their domain services are down for IP addressing and schemas, then that's actually really nice. I wouldn't be able to fill into any thoughts on one-click disaster recovery fix because I've never used that. I used what came before the one-click for the Cloud VLAN, which was 30 minutes of spinning up a virtual disk and virtual image in Datto Cloud and getting everything set up and running and then changing all the localized VLANs or ensuring that the VLAN in the cloud was the correct VLAN depending on use case—whether it was a hardware issue or a malware issue. That's the only one I could speak intelligently about.

I would rate this review at an eight out of ten overall.

We have been using Datto SIRIS for a few of our clients for backup purposes, and for a few others, we have been using it for both backup and recovery.

Instant Virtualization is the best feature of Datto SIRIS that we have liked so far, as it allows us to boot servers in minutes during outages.

The use of Datto SIRIS has significantly improved our Recovery Time Objectives. We have been using other software like Veeam and Microsoft Backup as well, so we have found Datto quite competitive to them. Our experience has been good so far, our clients are satisfied, and we have been handling outages effectively.

We have not had the opportunity to use the One-Click Disaster Recovery feature because the last time we experienced a phishing attack, it was resolved and did not escalate to a disaster scenario, so we did not need to use that feature.

Datto SIRIS improves reliability by providing storage space that enhances overall dependability. The centralized dashboards in the Hero Reports feature have been most beneficial for our IT reporting needs.

The Hero Reports feature provides extensive capabilities that include the specific points we need for our demonstration. Even if we want to use these features to train machine learning models, they are very useful for us, and we do not need to perform much work on the data to extract those features.

It has helped in reducing disaster recovery testing hours because it has features that help us by monitoring malicious activities throughout the database and notifying us of any fluctuations in normal behavior.

Datto SIRIS is good at assessing effectiveness regarding ransomware recovery, and it is competitive in the market. However, the only concern we have been thinking about is its pricing. The pricing of Datto SIRIS is more expensive than Veeam and Microsoft Backup. On the other hand, it provides many more options and much greater feasibility.

In Datto SIRIS, several areas have room for improvement. When we faced the initial setup with a very large dataset, the initial cloud sync was slow. The cost is higher compared to other platforms in the market like Veeam or Acronis. Large-scale restore from the cloud takes time and depends upon bandwidth. The UI is somewhat outdated and could be much more integrated, modern, and responsive.

We have been continuously using Datto SIRIS for our on-premise backup for almost five to six years.

We have seen a return on investment as it has saved us resources. We have automated all our backups, so we do not encounter any issues with backup failures. If there is a backup failure, we have also triggered a remediation command, so it is helping us save time and resources.

Scalability is dependent on the cloud provider we are using, so it cannot be solely judged through Datto SIRIS. If we are using AWS, we are having great services from AWS and would rate it an eight. Azure and GCP would receive a rating of six.

The maintenance of Datto SIRIS is easy because they have an auto-update system that keeps everything updated in accordance with current malwares and phishing injections available in the market. The updates are automatic. However, when there is an issue on our end such as a configuration issue that is not being resolved, we need to contact their customer support.

I would rate the technical support of Datto SIRIS as a seven.

Positive

We are not using the OneDeploy Secure Edge integration with Datto BCDR. We do not use the One-Click Cloud VLAN feature for pre-configuring cloud networking for DR testing because our networking is a separate function, and we are only using Datto SIRIS for our backups.

It is easy to deploy, but as mentioned, it is slow because when we redeploy it, we need to sync all our data again, which takes a considerable amount of time.

It has saved us approximately fifteen to twenty percent in time, money, and resources.

We would recommend Datto SIRIS to users who have a large infrastructure so that they can manage it efficiently and in any case of disaster, they can recover it quickly. However, we would not recommend it to small businesses because it can be costly for them. We give this product an overall rating of eight.