Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud alternatives and competitors

My clients need a successful, reliable disaster recovery solution that works well. They're using it for backup on-prem, to restore individual files if needed, and in case a physical server dies, so that they can spin up a virtual server within a couple of minutes. That way, they make sure that there is no interruption in service. We also use it to put up all those virtual servers in the cloud. If the company has to declare a disaster on-prem, they can actually work in the cloud within five to 10 minutes, so that they don't lose any business. It is really specific for on-prem environments because the cloud can run everything.

I have a client who had a server issue after a Windows update, the server blue-screened. We were able to spin up the equivalent in the Infrascale environment right away and they were able to do business as usual. We were then able to fix the local machine, get the server reinstated, and then restore the most recent backup to the machine on-prem. Everything worked without any incident.

The time it takes Infrascale to deliver a boot-ready failover in a disaster recovery situation is very quick. This will result in a lot less downtime and a lot less loss in business revenue, since many machines are very business-critical and need to be up and running as quickly as possible. With other solutions on the market, which do not give me the five-to-10-minute ready-time for disaster recovery of a server, my clients would lose a lot more money.

Among the most valuable features are

• regular backup 
• individual file restores
• disaster recovery, with the ability to spin up a VM within a short period of time.

It is also very important to our clients that Infrascale's Critical Server Insurance feature protects physical and virtual servers, including Windows, Linux, VMware, and Hyper-V. It's part of the total solution they offer that covers every server infrastructure you can imagine. They all get backed up into a virtual environment, which is fantastic. It's totally hardware-independent.

Similarly, the fact that that feature allows you to spin up locally or in the cloud, on demand, without declaration or extra fees is key. If I have a physical server go down locally, I can instantly put up this machine on-prem and it would replace the broken machine within a couple of minutes.

The Infrascale Dashboard is very easy to understand, has a good overview, and gives me access to all my appliances without having to have a local VPN connection to the individual clients. It makes it very easy to find my way around.

In addition, the backup and restore speeds are outstanding. The algorithm they use to migrate their data back and forth between the cloud and local appliances is great. Generally, it takes hardly any time to get a file restored to the original place on the server.

The only thing I would suggest, and I have talked to my manager about it already, is that they should have a direct backup-to-cloud solution. It should be something that does not require me to do an image backup, and then individual file and folder backups, to be able to restore individual files.

I have been using Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery for at least five years. I'm an Infrascale partner and I deploy it for my clients.

I'm very happy with the stability of the solution. I have had very few issues. 

One client has had the appliance for five years and we never had any hardware issues. There were a couple of firmware releases that caused a hiccup within the backup solution, but support was very quick to address those things, and even do hot-fixes for the specific appliance to get us going again.

Scalability is connected to hardware. When you sign up with Infrascale, there is a sheet where you provide your information and they configure the machine for you. Sometimes, growth projections concerning data or servers can change. For example, if a company grows 50 percent, instead of the projected 10 percent per year, there might be an issue where you have to replace the appliance earlier. I have not run into this issue and I don't know exactly how they would handle it if it happened.

There was a time when there was great room for improvement in Infrascale's support. This area has significantly improved over the last couple of years. Support has really started to shine during that time. Now, it's a pleasure to call support and get help and assistance. Before the turnaround, it was a pain. You just didn't even want to call them. You wanted to exhaust every other option first, locally, because you understood that the people in support were not going to be able to help unless they escalated it to the second or third level. The amount of time and patience it took, on my side, was just unacceptable.

The level of commitment of the support team, recently, has been great. It's very nice and gives me a lot of confidence when offering this solution to customers, because support really is doing an outstanding job now, helping and assisting as quickly as they can. The communication is outstanding and the follow-up is outstanding.

If they resolve an issue, they follow up the next day, if I don't get back to them in time. It's hard to say they're proactive as a support team, because you usually get support if you have an issue or a problem. They do, however, now notify customers when there are some changes in their data center and that the customer can expect some downtime. These notifications work a lot better than they did a couple of years ago.

The biggest lesson I have learned using Infrascale is being patient with support. In the beginning, when I signed up with Infrascale, our support was sub-par. There was no follow-up. The people they had in support were not capable of providing a solution. It took forever to get support information back. I gave them a lot of feedback at that time and they appreciated the feedback. As I said, over the last two years, there has been a huge turnaround in the support experience. I have reached out to my account manager and told him, multiple times, that support is really great now. Usually, companies hear about the things that are bad, but for me it was also important to mention the positive things to them.

Because I'm a technical person, I would do all the technical checking before I called support and that was true for every vendor, whether Microsoft or Infrascale. When I call support, I'm expecting to talk to somebody on a technical level and don't want someone to just read from a script and say, "Did you do this?" and, "Did you do that?" Now, they have technically knowledgeable people who can help instantly or escalate the ticket as needed, and there's no big delay anymore. Support really makes the product shine for me now.

Positive

The initial implementation process is straightforward. As soon as the appliance is added to the dashboard, I can configure anything related to the appliance through it, such as backups, retention, et cetera. All that type of configuration can be done remotely.

On average, it takes an hour to an hour and a half to deploy and configure the appliance. We try to understand the client's environment beforehand so that we can really dive in as soon as the appliance arrives on-site.

We have seen ROI with Infrascale. My customer had a different solution before and his monthly payment was three times as much as the payment he now has with Infrascale.

Infrascale's pricing, to me, was outstanding and was one of the major factors in my decision to go with Infrascale.

They changed the pricing model this year. The customers I have are not on this new pricing model yet, but I think the bottom line will be similar. It's just a matter of how they come up with the price. It's a little bit different, but I haven't really gotten into the details of it. It should still be easy to give a quote to a customer and say, "Hey, this is going to be your cost, period."

Many other providers have additional costs if you put up a machine, as well as per processor. If you use so much memory, there is a cost. If retention goes over a certain amount of time, there is a cost. There are so many limitations and so many different cost factors. I don't have any of those cost factors with Infrascale, after I buy the solution, because the price is not going to change unless I get into a higher tier of storage.

Before I went with Infrascale six years ago, because I am a solution/service provider, I checked out three or four different solutions: Acronis, Datto. I actually called all of them, had demos, looked at how they would handle certain things, what the pricing was, et cetera. For me, Infrascale had the best package to offer to my customers, including features, pricing, implementation, and support; everything that comprises the total solution.

My advice is "go for it."

I rate Infrascale an eight out of 10 because I still have to use another product for some of my clients who want to back up directly to the cloud. I know Infrascale was working on a direct backup solution about two or three years ago, because I tested their pilot and their beta versions. But unfortunately, they haven't followed through since. Maybe the market for this service is not as big as they were hoping at that time. But that's the only reason I have multiple vendors in this space. As soon as Infrascale comes out with a direct-to-cloud backup solution, I will most likely switch all my customers over to Infrascale as well.

The solution is an agent. It can be used to back up almost from Windows Servers 2008 up to Service Pack 1, up until 2019. It integrates with Veeam Backup & Replication, which can enable you to restore to the cloud or back up a cloud workload as well.

It clearly used to do image-based backups. The main reason Veeam came up with the Agent was that they were mainly focusing on virtual environments before and that was a major challenge for their existing customers. Not everyone is going with a fully virtual environment. Virtualization has many advantages, however, the virtual architecture design will remain physical if an organization's architecture is probably architected.

We had the challenge that Veeam has many VMware customers who have a Microsoft kind of infrastructure set up on VMware. They were basically using shared virtual disks and part of the limitation was that VMware was conducting snapshot full backups.

They created the Agent for these two use cases, to back up VMs that VMware cannot conduct a snapshot for, Windows VMs, and to back up physical servers that any customer would like to do so. At the end of the day, the main is that Veeam is paired with VMware.

We get more customers that want to back up and change it themselves. Veeam created this agent as a VMware-based backup of Windows operating systems.

The solution is very stable.

They have already invested a lot of R&D and mainly they're supported on most of the Windows scenarios, even the custom-tailored parts. 

The solution allows for full integration. I can deploy the Agent from the backup server and manage the backups all from the backup server. Or I can use the Agent as a stand-alone and discard the backup server. In terms of restoration, I can restore the entire machine, specific file systems, application actors, et cetera.

Restoring to the cloud is pretty flexible.

Technical support is quite good.

The initial setup has improved quite a bit from version 4 to 5. You don't need to worry about downtime.

If you have windows machine at home and you'd like a backup, you can always download their free edition and plug in an external hard disk, and do a full backup of your laptop.

They just released Version 5 for Version 11 and they released some amazing features with it, such as the backup and restore snapshots features. Before the agent was only able to back up through the network. Now it's even able to back up through the SAN fabric, depending on the customer environment.

I can't think of an area where the solution is lacking in features. Overall, it's quite good, and more money is going into R&D already.

That said, there are many things they can develop for the Linux agent. The Windows agent is quite complete.

Some customers have Oracle databases and Veeam does support back up of Oracle databases. There is a specific setup in Oracle when you have the Oracle databases configured with the ASM - something related to Oracle storage back up. Veeam cannot back up or restore ASM disks as of right now. It could be something they could offer in the future.

Some customers that are in the industrial sector are using legacy systems, systems that are very old and running on Windows 2000 or Windows NT, Windows 2003, and they're physical, they're not even virtual. Veeam here is pretty weak, as Veeam supports 2008 or Service Pack 1 and above. Anything before that, the Veeam Agent for Windows will not be able to back up anything.

I don't expect Veeam to be releasing agents for older editions of operating systems. Veeam itself is a new company. On the other hand, if you go to the competition, like Veritas, you'll see that Veritas is a well-established company in the market since way back and therefore they have these agents that can back up the older versions of Windows.

I've used the solution ever since its first release, since Version 1. That has been since around 2015 or 2016 or so. It's been a few years at this point. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

I'm not sure about the scalability. With the agent, it should be pretty simple. You install it on each and every single server and then you back up. You can deploy it also with servers, however, the Agent will be in use on each and every single operating system which you want to back up. It can be also used for the PC environment, laptops, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10.

It's hard to count the number of users our clients have. There are many.

Technical support is amazing. They're quick to respond and accurate in terms of the support that's provided. You really don't worry about getting stuck in limbo. Regarding the Veeam Agent for Windows team, they're amazing. They are responsive. You don't have to wait a long time for a reply. They are very good.

The difficulty of each deployment depends on which version. They have improved the latest version, however, before, on Version 4, while the installation was straightforward, the problem was that it had a prerequisite requirement, which is the development framework on 4.7.2. This framework is not usually installed on all Windows operating systems. The problem is that it is free, and you can download it at any time and install it, however, it will require the service to be restarted and that means planned downtime.

Fortunately, they fixed that with Version 5. They changed the framework dependency to 4.5.2. so that there is no more forced downtime. 

The time it takes to deploy relies on various factors, however, assuming the prerequisites are all ready, it takes about 15 minutes.

I can handle the installation myself with support from a field-certified architect so there is no downtime.

Veeam did a major revamp in their licensing schema over the past three years. A lot of changes have happened within a very short timeframe. They almost then seemed irrational at first. However, now, somehow they figured how to have a great licensing model. It's called the Veeam Universal License.

This Veeam Universal License is meant to be a portable license. Before what used to be the problem is some customers would buy Veeam for VMware in five minutes, but now they've moved to a Nutanix and their license will no longer be valid. Veeam created this license so that you can use this license for the Agent for Windows, or, if you would like for the Agent to be for Linux, or if you would like it for VMware, or the Hyper-V or Nutanix, you can use it there.

Whatever Veeam features in Veeam Availability Suite, which encompasses Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Agents for Windows, Linux, and even Unix and Solaris, if you need to buy plug-ins or you're going to need an environment for SAP HANA, they have the support for SAP on Oracle and their backups. All of that's under the Veeam Universal License. They have unified it on a licensing model which works everywhere. So that makes it a lot simpler.

The only problem is that the license comes in bundles. It's not sold individually; it comes in bundles of 10 instances. Each instance is enough for a physical server.

The pricing is moderate. The solution falls in the middle of a few different options. It's not the cheapest, however, it's not the most expensive either. Comparing it with Veritas or Commvault or Rubik or Cohesity, for example, Veeam will definitely be a lot cheaper, as it's a software that has a very straightforward licensing model. However, solutions like Acronis will always be cheaper.

I've compared the solution with various products in terms of pricing. From my experience, to compare Veeam for example, to a Commvault or Veritas, Veeam is much cheaper. However, if you compare Veeam with Acronis or these small-time vendors, Veeam is very expensive.

We are a distributor, not a reseller.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's a great product. The only drawback is the support for the ASM disks and the support for legacy Windows operating systems.

I'd recommend the solution to other companies. It's a straightforward solution. I am mostly a Linux guy, therefore, we're not as focused on Windows. In general, it's worked like a charm. It's helped me do backups and restores and it has never failed me in that perspective, except for the ASM disk issues.

We have many customers that are using Veeam Backup for replication and for disaster recovery sites. All our customers use Veeam Backup.

We use it for Nutanix as well. We have many clients that have Nutanix and use Veeam Backup to replicate workloads to another site, a backup or DR site.

We work with Veeam Backup for Office 365. We have two products that we back up. We back up workloads in Azure and Office to on-premise with Veeam for Office.

The solution does good backups.

It is stable.

The scalability is good. 

The problem that we have is that it's slow. We need bandwidth or we can't do full backup. We can't do a full backup a week. The only corporation backup is incremental and we haven't the option or the feature to do a full backup in the middle of the week. That's our problem. We call Microsoft to give us the bandwidth, however, Office doesn't integrate acceleration traffic to compress traffic. That's the problem of Veeam for Office.

They could include WAN acceleration to compress the traffic to make things faster.

We'd also like the option to do a full backup at any time, like in Veeam Backup and Replication.

Support is very slow. 

We've been using the solution for one year.

The solution is always stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product scales well. It's very easy to expand. 

We tend to work with small and medium-sized organizations. 

The support is quite bad. They advise too late. When we call for support, it really does take far too long for a response. Many other providers are faster.

We've used Acronis and Naviko as well. Veeam is better.

The price is moderate. Acronis is much cheaper than Veeam. Naviko and IQ are also pricey.

I can't speak to the exact costs of the solution. 

We are reseller in Morocco. We are Veeam partners.

I would rate the solution six out of ten. 

I have found the backup call feature very good.

I have found that the reporting could improve in its structure.

In an upcoming release, the remote site application, physical workload, and other application integration could improve.

I have been using the solution for approximately four years.

We have experienced some bugs that we reported to the Veeam team and most of the issues have been resolved. For example, we had an issue recovering a file that was 256 characters long which we were testing out. We resolved it by restoring the whole volume.

We are satisfied with the technical support.

We have also worked with Acronis, Commvault, and Veritas.

The initial setup is very simple.

The price of the solution could improve when comparing it to competitors. The market is very competitive and they should have some discounts or special offers.

We have evaluated Commvault and they have a very fantastic rating compared to Veeam Replication. 

I rate Veeam Backup Replication an eight out of ten.

We are using this product to back up our HDS node, which is part of a six-node cluster.

The most valuable feature is the extra protection, especially for the backup.

The interface is user-friendly.

The biggest problem that we have is when the antivirus is installed, the whole machine runs very slowly and some of the machines hang. We had installed it on 500 machines, but when our customer started having issues, we uninstalled it. It seems that it is not able to work on the servers.

Our customers were disappointed with this product and discontinued the service.

We have been using Acronis for the past three years.

This is not a stable product because of the antivirus component. There are a lot of issues.

We have not tried scaling but we have almost 800 users.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is complex and it took a month to deploy.

Licensing fees are billed annually and there are no extra charges.