BDRSuite Backup & Replication Reviews

We back up servers and workstations.

One of the things that Vembu does for us is, of course, create high-availability for backups, which, if we came to a worst-case scenario, is one of the reasons we selected it, with the high incidence of ransomware. Should we be hit with ransomware, optimally it would allow us to be back up and running pretty quickly.

The solution helps us deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce budgets. It's difficult to estimate how much we have saved, although I know we have saved. We did do a cost analysis up-front and we saved money compared to our prior solution.

The most valuable feature is the ability, from a console, to manage the different computers to be backed up.

In addition, I use the encryption regularly, and the deduplication as well, but not extensively. The deduplication is very handy. It reduces the size of the backups, which we can then upload to an online storage platform. That's one of the reasons I selected it.

We've been using Vembu for about nine months.

I have had issues where it was working and then it stopped and I had to diagnose what had changed or gone wrong to get it back up. While it is generally stable, I've had issues with stability. The last time we had this issue was about six weeks ago.

It's very scalable. As we add workstations, as we grow, we'll generally use the solution on those new workstations.

Customer service could be improved. There seems to be a delay when trying to get to someone for customer service issues. Usually they'll tell me to send an email. That is one area that I would like to see improved.

I had pretty good technical support while we were evaluating the product. Since then, it has not been so good.

We had a solution before Vembu. We switched because of the cost factor and the deduplication.

It was not particularly straightforward. I had to contact customer service in order to complete the initial set up. The deployment took us the better part of a day to complete everything, because we had to reach out to customer service.

We started out by testing it on a workstation and, once we were satisfied that it met our needs, we deployed it to the servers and to the other workstations.

We did it in-house.

The pricing is pretty reasonable.

We looked at Macrium Reflect. That was another solution that we used.

It's a robust solution. Evaluate it first in the environment and ensure that it actually satisfies your needs. It's a fairly cost-effective solution. For us, it has assisted in developing a robust backup strategy of keeping a backup in-house. We back up to a NAS in-house, and then we try to do an online backup off the in-house backup, so that we always have a remote copy of our backup. So it's been a pretty robust solution.

We have about 25 workstations that we're backing up. There are two of us, my IT person and me, who handle the deployment and management of the backup solution.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten because customer service could be improved. I don't have a specific problem with the product. In our experience, the initial implementation could be easier. The product itself, once implemented, gets the job done. If it was divided up, I would give the working product a ten. But the initial implementation, from our experience, because we needed to have customer service log in to our system and walk us through, I would give a seven. And I would give customer service a seven.

We back up all our customers' files. We back up only files, and maybe some databases. However, primarily, we are backing up files on our own server.

We are currently using the updated version of this product.

We can create a backup contract with our customers and software using this solution. We can backup the software here in Austria, because we have new rules here in Europe, since last year, which are very strict for data protection. 

The network solution is the most important feature, because we have our own backup server and are doing file backups for our customers.

The compression, encryption and deduplication features are important. If we can save space, it's okay. The encryption is also very important, because it is in our contracts. It is a must. We have to use it for our customers.

We have not been able to move our backups from one drive to another one. We can only create a storage pool. However, if we want to change a drive, it is not possible to delete one drive as long there is data on it. For this, we have to call the support. While they can solve this, it is not out-of-the-box.

If there is a failure, the logging for the backups could be better.

Sometimes, I miss some features from the old solution. 

The stability is very good, but it is not perfect. Sometimes, we have to restart the server, because of updates. I have to sometimes manually restart the services. When it is running, it's perfect and nice. 

When we have to restart the server, then we have some troubles with the services from Vembu. We have to manually restart the services, and afterwards, it's okay.

The software solution is okay. While it has some bugs, it has been okay in most cases. 

It takes me two to five hours to do maintenance per week.

We have small customers. For them, high availability is not a priority, only file backup is important. They are very small. They have around five employees. Also, because our customers are not asking for this, we do not offer high availability. We do not have the resources for it, and our servers are probably not big enough for this type of solution. We only offer the simple file backup.

Our biggest customer has about 20 employees. However, they have a huge amount of data.

We have three users in our company, but we represent about 30 companies. All three employees in our company are systems engineers. We do the backups, deployments, and maintenance.

At the moment, we do not accept new customers because we do not want to grow. We are happy with what we have. We have a lot to do. We have had good customers for a lot of years, and that's perfect.

They have very good support. I always get an answer quite fast when we have trouble. When we write an email, on next day, we will have an answer. This is really good and unusual. I like the support.

Previously, we had only local backup solutions at our customers on tapes. We had trouble all the time with tapes. This was more than 10 years ago. Then, we switched to drives to create the backups at our customers' sites, but all the time these drives were defect. So, we implemented a big server in our company, where we only have to do maintenance on one big device, not on all the small devices at our customers. We searched for a solution, and Vembu was our first choice.

The current version of Vembu is much better now than the previous version. The newer version is nice. It may not have as many features as the older solution, but it is faster and better to administrate. It is a good solution.

The initial setup is easy and very nice. 

The deployment was not a big project. The backup service was running in a few hours. Then, we have only to implement clients at our customers. 

The process is quite fast. We set up a back up server, then alert the clients. We use a Windows Server with a lot of storage capacity. There is no need for an implementation strategy.

We had an old solution with the old clients. We moved them step-by-step as individual customers to the new solution over half a year. 

Only from within the organization was it a little tricky, because we had to implement new contracts for our customers. It was technically a little different with the old solution. We did need a new server. Also, we had to move all our customers to the new solution step-by-step.

The return of investment was very fast, within half a year. 

The best thing about the product is the license management. It is a true managed service provider solution. It has a good price. The licensing is quite flexible, which is one of the most important things for us. 

The high availability is too expensive for our customers.

I did a lot of evaluations before choosing a product. We tested about 20 different products. Vembu was the best. Some of the other solutions were also very good, but were extraordinarily priced (too expensive). Others, I didn't like the licensing, software, or were only cloud solutions. 

Vembu has the flexibility with its licenses and is a real managed service provider solution. My feeling is that Vembu understands what a service provider needs, not only local administrators. It is one of the reasons that why we chose Vembu.

We haven't found another solution for its price with all this features.

I would recommend the product. I already recommend it to our partners. It is a really good solution. I like the product. It has good support. For small companies, it's the perfect solution.

We do not use virtual environments. We have done this in the past, but we do not implement virtual clients anymore since we have only small customers and virtual appliances are now on cloud spaces. So, we do not have virtual servers at our customers.

We have used Hyper-V, but it was not beneficial.

We use it purely for Hyper-V backup. It's used to protect our entire server estate.

Our previous backup solution was cloud-based rather than being on-premise, and quite often our backups could lag three or four days behind. We are now looking at having a restore point as low as 30 minutes, where the backup has never been more than an hour behind the live solution.

We use it to back up Hyper-V, and the key benefit of that is purely one of data security and dependability.

The most important features are the backup and the availability of the Universal Explorer.

The in-transit compression is great.

The deduplication could be better. It doesn't give the level of deduplication that I would get with a product that's stored in a more standard file format. I would prefer to be able to use a non-deduplicated store on a third-party deduplicated medium. But as far as the compression and the general structure go, I have no problems with them at all.

Having some flexibility for the backup to be stored in a non-deduplicated fashion so that we could store it on more high-efficiency storage would be helpful; either that or improvement to the data deduplication. The amount of storage it requires for the backup store is excessive, compared to other solutions.

It is absolutely stable. We've had no issues. It's never missed a backup and we've had no issues with data stores, even when we had an issue with the hardware which one of the data stores was on. That was very quickly recoverable and we didn't miss a backup. We've not missed a backup since installing it a year-and-a-half ago.

We're a very small business. We've only got two Hyper-V hosts that it's covering. I imagine the scalability is probably quite good, but I have no other comment on it.

Technical support is fantastic. Responses are normally received within about an hour to an hour-and-a-half. Where something has required escalation, it's been completed within a few hours. We've had very little contact with support, but where we've needed it the response has pretty much been a fix the first time.

We used Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, backing up to Azure cloud and we switched for two reasons: 

1. Vembu is less expensive.
2. It gave us more control as to where we keep that data.

The initial setup was absolutely straightforward. We had an issue, but that was caused by a problem in our Hyper-V environment, rather than Vembu itself. That was dealt with within a couple of days by Vembu support.

The deployment took about three days. It was really fast.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we were moving from Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager to Vembu. We are quite a small business so we only have two Hyper-V hosts to configure. The strategy was to install, test, and then remove the Microsoft product. It was a very straightforward plan, a very straightforward strategy. And the aim in doing so was to enable a more rapid recovery time.

We did most of the work ourselves. We didn't use a reseller at all, it was so easy to deploy.

It's only saving us about £2,000 to £3,000 a year. But in our IT, that is a help. Our IT budget is only about £250,000 a year so it's saving us one to two percent of our IT budget.

Regarding return on investment, the value of a backup system comes up when you actually need to restore it, so up until the point of restoration a backup system is purely a cost on your P&L, rather than being of any asset value. We've not had the requirement to restore, so the only cost-benefit we've had is in the cost savings over our previous solution.

The pricing and licensing structure are spot on. I don't think there's anything out there in the market that does either the licensing structure or the pricing structure better.

We evaluated Veeam but we selected Vembu because the feature set was what we needed. We didn't need to use Veeam's full recovery, full replication suite. Because of that, our costs are about a quarter of what they would have been with Veeam.

Go ahead and give it a try. It's worth the evaluation and certainly, with the restore options and the Universal Explorer option, it's competitive with things like Trilead and Veeam in terms of backup. Personally, I don't think it's as good as Veeam if you are looking at replication and high-availability but, other than that, for straight backup, I don't think there's anything in the market that's better.

There are only six of us in our IT department who use it. Nobody else has any real comments on it. It's something that sits there and does its job, and does it well. In terms of deployment and maintenance, two of us are responsible for ensuring the backup is operational and maintained.

It's used to protect our entire server estate. It's not a very big server estate, but it is the entire estate. There are no plans to extend its usage. There's nothing to extend it to.

I would give Vembu a ten out of ten. I've evaluated other products. I don't think anybody else has any advantage, certainly in terms of backup, over what Vembu provides. If I were to mark it down to a nine, it would just be for the lack of flexibility on the backup storage option.

We're doing onsite local backups as well as offsite DR of our VM infrastructure.

Realistically, it is no different than the previous backup solution we were using, other than it costs less. As far as workflow is concerned, it hasn't really changed.

We use it to back up our VM infrastructure, but as far as benefiting the organization, it's just a guarantee that, if we go down, I can spool it back up at either location. That's the biggest benefit to this sort of backup solution, instead of files on another drive.

This is a part of our enterprise backup solution. It has saved us a considerable amount of money.

The agentless backups are the big selling point on this, as well as being able to send out across sites so that I can do a restore at either of our two locations.

The compression is good. As far as the encryption is concerned, I'm glad that it's there for site to site. We don't necessarily need it just because of the way that we're connected, so it's not really a selling feature, one way or the other.

The only place where I would really want to see improvement, out the gate, is more granular scheduling. With the previous solution that we were using, you could pick different times based on different days. Right now, with Vembu, I just have every X number of hours on these days, but if I want to do an offset or to only do two backups on Friday and Saturday - versus whole hourly incrementals during the week - I don't have that granularity. That would be something that I would be looking for.

With the exception of when we required that initial hotfix, it has been extremely stable.

Scalability is part of the reason why we got it. The opportunity to push the offsite data recovery to multiple sites, instead of just, one was a big selling feature for us. Currently, we are a two-location organization, but we want the opportunity to be able to scale up and pop another one of these units down to another location and have them replicate freely between.

The tech support is phenomenal. We were not expecting a fix to happen as quickly as it did. The response time, through everything I've experienced so far with them, has been within an hour.

We did use a different solution previous to this. It was an onsite and cloud-based solution. With the cloud-based component, we switched because of the cost savings with Vembu, because we have two sites that we can leverage. The two sites are for disaster recovery, which is far cheaper than doing a cloud-based backup.

We had a few issues with the initial setup that were solved by support. The actual installation of the software was simple enough. However, there was a bug. We required a hotfix to get two of our larger backups going. But that was remedied within a few days by their engineering team and it has been working flawlessly since. With the exception of just waiting for that to go, it was fairly painless.

The deployment took roughly a week. But we were also figuring out a bunch of different backend stuff as well, so it wasn't a week on the software package in particular. It's a part of a larger backup solution. To get the entire thing up and going was about a week.

In terms of implementation strategy, we did build-outs on separate servers so that we would have dedicated servers that would be doing the backups, instead of having the BDR suite reside on our VM infrastructure. The reasons for that strategy were

1. to limit overhead on our current infrastructure and 
2. if any of our hosts went down, our backup would not be part and parcel of our host network. 

It was completely segregated, just to keep the business continuity intact as much as possible.

We were in trial for about a month, and the actual deployment has been in place for about a month.

We did it all in-house.

Our return in investment for this solution, including all the additional hardware that we chose to purchase for it, including hard drives and the server host that it runs on, as well the subscription, means it will be about a six- to seven-month return on investment for us.

The subscription model that we're signed up for is very good. The only thing that is something of a sticking point is the fact that you can't do PO-based licensing. It's all just credit card. That required a little bit of a sell for management because typically everything we do is PO-based and our previous solution was PO-based. That would be the only thing about the subscription service that we didn't really enjoy.

We were really only looking at Vembu. It was brought to our attention by a reseller we had used for another product, as the backup solution that they typically push for clients. We thought we would take a look at it and, after we ran our trials, we found that it would work for us.

Have a separate backup appliance, if you can, a separate, physical backup appliance so that if your host goes, your backup doesn't go down with it at the same time.

As far as the encryption is concerned, I'm glad that it's there for site to site. We don't necessarily need it just because of the way that we're connected, so it's not really a selling feature, one way or the other.

We don't use Hyper-V. Our Vembu is working with EXSi. I have not had to do a full server restore, yet. But I have had to do restores of incremental points in time, for certain files. We have tested the restore feature of the entire guest VM. If I have a server go down, I have a lot of people who can't do work. So a fast restore is critical.

It's just our core IT team that is actually using the solution. There are three people who have direct access to it, but we serve a larger number of users in our organization. However, they don't see anything as far as backend or backups are concerned. As far as they know, nothing's changed, nothing's different, it has no effect or impact on their day-to-day operations.

For deployment and maintenance, now that it's set up, there's not much to do on it, aside from doing checks every so often to ensure that the backups are still happening.

There is a potential use case to increase usage, such as doing some critical workstation backups with it. However, we are not doing that at this time.

I give the solution an eight out of ten. Everything has some room for improvement. The more granular backup scheduling is one of them. There was a slight hiccup that we weren't really expecting, when we were first looking into this, where you can't do a restore while a backup is in process. That was a bit of an annoyance at first, but once we got an explanation from their technical team as to why it's designed and built out like that, it made more sense. It's just one thing that I realize they can't fix but it would be a nice to have.

The primary use case is for backup.

I am using the latest version.

What we like best about the system is the use of its operation and the backups versus what we had to do earlier. We use it to back up our virtual environments, mainly VMware.

Everything is happening in the background without running any commands. It runs seamlessly in the back, so this is a great achievement. This is also a great convenience for this organization. Previously, somebody had to do it manually all the time.

We are now using it 24/7 because it is serving as an online backup, and very soon, the DR will activated on the product.

We invest in the backup so the continuity of the data is not affected.

It takes the sever directly from your VM environment.

The compression, encryption, and deduplicatuion are quite useful.

We are still exploring its features, but we want to see more features that we desire over time.

It is fairly stable.

At the moment, we have an administrator whose responsible for the device.

I am the only person handling the device. It is very straightforward, We have just one person in the organization, a consultant, and I don't go to the site on a daily basis.

I am happy with the technical support. Whenever I have contacted them, I have received the results that I was looking for.

This is the first time that we used this type of solution. We were quite happy with what we received.

The initial setup was quite good. There were no major hiccups.

Even the support teams supported us, which was quite helpful. The deployment took a few minutes. 

I am the consultant. I recommended this solution to my client.

I think this solution will help us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduce budgets. We will be moving more into that very soon.

The pricing could have been cheaper.

With another client, we had looked at Veritas. wihich is also quite stable. Between this solution and Veritas, I found this solution to be more user-friendly in terms of its interface.

Go for it. This solution suits organizations where there is no dedicated IT manpower. It can be managed by somebody, like a consultant, who can handle the entire thing. 

We are quite happy with the latest version and how it works. We are convinced that this is the right product.

I haven't used it with Microsoft Hyper-V.

We use it for providing backups and recovery. We have a file server with a little over seven terabytes of data. The content changes quite a bit and we needed an easy tool to work with that would give us the ability to restore in a variety of ways: at the individual file level, folder level, and whole volume level, if necessary. This tool does that for us.

We're in telecom and wireless. We do installations and maintenance of towers and equipment for microwave and cellular. We do that mostly in the United States, occasionally in other places in the world. We'll have 400 people out in the field providing data to us that we have to put in a repository, that's the file server, that shows work prior to us initiating our work assignment from our customer, during the process, and at completion. That way, the customer doesn't have to go to remote places to verify. Sometimes, we can address an intermittent problem and say it's fixed and, of course, it comes back the next day because it really wasn't fixed. So, it's hard for our customer to know when something is done.

So we take a lot of images of our work, associated with projects, and those are uploaded by the field people every day. We provide the backup necessary to our customer. We'll receive ten or 20 gigabytes of images daily, which go into the repository. They have to be tracked and recorded, put into the reports associated with the projects and the status of those projects, and then provided to our customers.

That's what we do on a daily basis. We're a 24/7 shop, so what we do has to minimize downtime, so that the tools are available to the people, especially if they're in the field. They'll VPN in and provide reports and images necessary to show the work has been performed.

The nice thing about Vembu is that when it's running - as it does incrementals daily - we don't see a negative hit on the performance of the server it runs on. I can also pause it, should that happen, but I've never had to do that. 

It generates daily reports. I look at them seven days a week, even though I only work five days a week, because I want to make sure that everything's working fine. From a productivity standpoint, it has not hindered anyone and it keeps me very well informed that our backups are being completed. It gives me the data that I need to know, that makes me feel comfortable: Yes, that makes sense for that day, that much data being added to our repository, etc.

It has made my job, making sure we have a backup and being able to count on using it, a lot easier. As far as impacting the user community that uses the file server that's being addressed for backup purposes, it has not impacted them in any negative way whatsoever.

Finally, it helps us deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce budgets at a price that - and we don't want to encourage them to change their pricing - is a great value.

The dashboard is very easy to use, setting up the backup is very intuitive. Since that's our primary purpose in using it, it made it easy, when I was doing evaluations a year ago, to choose the product.

If I want to back up to this past Friday, and reinstall the file server to that state, I can choose a point in time and issue the command to back up and I don't need to go in and restore the last full backup and then apply iteratively, sequentially, all the incrementals, as I've had to do in some other software in the past. It's nice that I can pick a point in time and tell it I want to go to that state and it's transparent to me. It happens in the background for me.

It's very easy to use, very quick and efficient. From a backup standpoint, it has provided us the tools we need on a daily basis to know that it's working properly and with almost no manual maintenance work from us to verify it. It just comes to us. It's been very positive, helping us address that need efficiently.

In the beginning, when we had some hiccups, I would chalk that up more to a learning curve for the product. Once we understood how it operated - where we thought it was doing something a certain way and it was not - it was easy to understand, once it was pointed out.

The times when we've had problems, they've not been repeated problems, they've been addressed, and it was more learning curve issues. With any software there is a learning curve. Not all backup software operates exactly the same way, so some things were a little bit different. But once we understood why and how they worked, it made sense. It was sometimes a different approach, but not a problem for us.

There is no problem with the product's stability. We get our nightly reports on schedule. We've never had the application fail, and better, the application doesn't interfere with anyone else's application. It's been everything and more than what we had hoped for.

I can only speak for our environment where we've used it - and I know it has so much more capabilities, because when we go in through the dashboard and the wizard to create backups, we see where we could use it and how we could use it. But in our environment, whether we had seven-and-a-half terabytes or 15, I wouldn't have to change anything.

The other thing that I like is that it has software to provide a distributed copy to another site. It's a very economical add-on to the suite. But because it's terabytes, and with it going across the Internet to do the initial cloning of that, it has a feature where you bring in your other servers, set it up, establish your initial clone there, and you put the server out and then you only have to keep track of the changes, which is much easier to do. We have a 100-megabit connection to the internet, but even there, if you're going to have to keep terabytes worth of data synced, it would be really hard. In this case, we only have to keep track of the delta once the initial distributed backup has been made.

It has a lot of capabilities. We just started getting into the distributed backup and, from a scalability perspective, I've not seen any issues in our use of it. And especially in the beginning, we monitored the resource usage to make sure that we didn't see a degradation on the server to the user. That was not a problem.

I could easily see us doubling what we're backing up without any issues and problems and with no additional tuning necessary.

The other thing that stands out, while it isn't a feature per se, is support. Any time we have a question, whether we call or email them, we get an amazing response. We're not a Fortune 500 company, we're smaller, we don't have a large number of licenses yet. But we get quick response and follow-up to make sure that the issue has been properly addressed, as though we were a Fortune 500 company. I'm amazed by the level of support they provide.

Last time I contacted them was because the volume that we put our backups on became full, and I wasn't sure what the best way was to address the problem. They gave me directions on how to address the problem, but more importantly, on how to avoid the problem in the future.

Around October of 2018, I did escalate an issue regarding backups but that was the only time that I can remember having to do so. Like everything else, it went extremely well. The follow-up and the level of detail, hands-on, were great. I've been in IT for 40 years and it's not something I'm used to seeing. It has been a nice surprise.

The oldest previous solution we had was Windows Server Backup.

Once we put Vembu on the production server, we ran a full backup that evening. That's probably one of the nicest things about the backup. Not that companies don't have seven-plus terabytes of data to backup - that's large, but there are certainly many that have much more than that - but backing up that much data in Windows Backup is an impossible task. So the ability to address the data in the way that Vembu does, versus the way Windows Backup does, we had to use a Vembu-type product. There was no choice. Seven-and-a-half terabytes in Windows Backup, on a server level, would've taken weeks, which is not acceptable.

We needed a solution that was doable. Some of the solutions that we were using took an unreasonable amount of time to back up the data. Even when they were running on the same server and the pool was on the same server that they were backing up to, it was not acceptable. We needed something that was more efficient in the way it addressed reading the file structure. Vembu provided that. Then we had the additional functionalities that we wanted to be able to restore the way I mentioned, plus the support. I can't say enough about the support Vembu. I just don't have any other positive experiences that are as nice as what they provide.

Nothing was complex regarding the initial setup. We could do backups on day one with the software. It wasn't a question of just doing the backups but of trying to do them so it provided us the greatest amount of flexibility and that we were using our pool space as efficiently as we could. That took a little bit of investigating and communication with support. But once we understood it, it was not a problem.

On the initial install, there were some things that I thought were going to happen a little differently. We thought we wouldn't eat up the size of our pool, our repository, for backups as quickly because of compression. But when you think about it, that's not a Vembu issue. That's just a practical result of the fact that jpegs already come compressed, so you're not going to get much compression. We underestimated the amount of space we needed.

Installing it takes just a couple of hours. It's easy to do. There was no negative impact on anything else running on it. It was simple. We did a backup the same day we installed it, in a test environment, so we could do whatever we wanted. We could do restores, do incrementals, combine incrementals to weeklies, etc. And we didn't have any problem doing any of those things. We'd have a question, periodically, but we would get a response the same day, which was always nice.

In terms of staff for deployment, I'll divide that into two pieces. One was a more thorough test of our environment, versus not the high-level tests that we did during the evaluations. We did that over a two-week period of time with a quarter to a half of a person.

Regarding the implementation strategy we developed, there was an assessment of what our needs were, tailored to our specific situation. Once we did that, we evaluated what products we might be able to use. We then considered support and maintenance issues and would the products be able to function within our requirements, timeframes, and give us the backup capabilities at the levels that we wanted: file, folder, and volume. This process allowed us to come up with a shortlist of three products and do a little bit deeper testing with them and decide on which one we thought was the best. 

We haven't done an analysis of how much money we have saved by switching to Vembu. We did a post-implementation assessment that made sure all of our requirements were met. Part of that is financial, but I can divulge the savings that it provided.

I've worked for extremely large companies as well as startup companies. In our environment - out of this office we have 400 field people - we're a relatively small business. If I was backing up multiple file servers, much more data than we are, it wouldn't take much more time with Vembu. There's an inherent amount of time to install and get to know a product, and then to use it. If it's pretty intuitive with good support, it can be really easy. Vembu has turned out to be really easy. The amount of budget associated with supporting is way under what we expected. That's a good thing and that's because of the support that they provide, instead of us having to do things like we have to do with some of our other applications.

For example, we've used our accounting system for a long time here, and people are used to it; creatures of habit, like most. But the amount of support that it takes, despite it being here for decades, means that any time we make a change it's way more involved. There's an element of risk that we don't care for. It's not what we like. There's an unpredictability about it. We have not seen that with the Vembu product.

It's an amazing value. Their licensing structure is easy to understand and it's very fair. We don't have any problem with it.

We looked at different tools and tested them ourselves. We had our own requirements list of what we needed to do, and it was all tailored to our environment. The evaluation occurred over a month of elapsed time and probably involved a person to person-and-a-half in that period of time.

Quite honestly, we could have gone with other products, but the support level from Vembu was unparalleled. Today, a lot of companies want to refer you to a forum, a community, and they don't want to talk. They don't want to provide people who know the product and know your situation. It's hard to find an example in a forum that is exactly like what you're trying to address. Vembu, consistently over the month, as well as the second-level evaluation, was always there to provide support and answer questions. It was a deciding factor, absolutely. They had the functionality, but they provided the real people for support, which just made a world of difference for us.

Some of the companies that we were using and evaluating, when we told them what we ended up choosing, just out of courtesy, in some cases they either didn't know who they were or acted like they didn't know who they were. 

It was an easy decision, when it came to the end, to choose Vembu.

It has to meet your needs. But for most people, for backups of large amounts of data, I would strongly encourage you to use it, and not be hesitant to contact the support desk if you have a question. Don't just install it with the intent that your first use is going to be your final setup because there are ways to tune it to make it more efficient on space usage for the pool where you put your backups. The help is there. That's the good thing. With most other products, you're not going to get the same response. Use the help and you're probably going to be quite happy with it.

I would encourage you to count on support, run your tests, play with it, and you'll be pleasantly surprised and happy with the results.

Of the software that I license, I feel I get more value from this than any others. I just can't think of anything that I'm looking for that Vembu BDR isn't already addressing. I've got no wish list for them.

Everything I need is being addressed by the product and then some. I wish them great success and I want them to be around a long time. I don't want to have to go and replace this. This is a good product. It does what we need and I'm not seeing anything that I wish it had.

I like the compression, encryption, and deduplication features, although in our case, we don't get much compression because a lot of our material is already compressed. There just isn't an opportunity to see a big reduction. But the tools allow us to have every feature we want, including being able to restore from the backups. Of course, we don't have to do full backups very often, because of the way it has been set up.

Encryption today is, obviously, given privacy issues and confidentiality, very important. In our particular case, it's an added plus but it wasn't a real high criterion because the data that we have is not considered highly confidential. In fact, if it was put out in the public domain, it would not cause our customer or ourselves a problem. It's nice to have, but it wasn't something that was as critical to us as it might be to a lot of others.

We don't use it to back up our virtual environments. We keep things very discreet here. We don't run a VM type of environment. Servers are by function. Hardware has become so incredibly cheap. I understand the savings, the value with VM and having a virtual environment for different things. But to us, hardware is just incredibly inexpensive. If we have something in our accounting system that needs to be addressed, an upgrade or the like, we like having it on its own server and discreet from everything else. It also inherently provides easier access control for those systems that are more critical, in terms of the type of information on them.

Regarding staff for maintenance of the solution, we're talking fractions. We just look at our reports daily just to make sure that they are giving us the information we need, indicating that backups were successful and that the expected amount of data that was backed up. We know how much data comes in every day approximately. We can confirm that it's been done properly. It's just minutes a day. I don't think it needs a full day per month of attention. The maintenance is extremely low.

We have other environments that we need to address in a different way than we are today. The company is old enough that, like most entities, it is a creature of habit. So changing the way we do things is a little slow sometimes. But I can see us using this in several other environments, other than what we initially targeted. I can't tell you when that will happen but I believe that it will happen because of the experience we've had.

The end-users don't use it, per se, because they have no touch with it. It's IT that uses it. Nobody has a problem with it. We have a small group of six IT people in this main building. We try to get different people exposed to it. They vary from application support, mostly in the accounting area, and then, because we do a lot of VPN, we have network people who handle network security. We have failover network with multiple ISPs so networking becomes a big issue, plus the security side. Percentage-wise, there are more people involved in network and security than in many companies. Yet those people are still required to be able to support the applications we have, including Vembu. Nobody's had a problem doing that.

I'd love to try it in a virtual environment. We just don't do that here. We're a Windows Server shop, so I've not tried it in other operating systems, like Unix and Linux.

For my needs, I'd give Vembu a nine out of ten, and that's only because I'm hesitant to say anything is perfect.

Everything could be improved. For example, if you were to have a custom backup solution created, it might be a ten if they achieved everything you listed regarding what you need. But it's not practical to do that for an individual or a small company. I've been responsible for a lot of development people and developing applications. It's somewhat subjective on where you place buttons and how efficient they are.

Once you get used to a product, if it wasn't made for you, and it's working and meeting all your needs, without having negative side effects, you got to give it a high score. It's the only fair thing to do. The only way for me to get to a ten is to say that it's perfect, that it laid out all its buttons and features just as I would. If I had written it, maybe that would be the case, but by the time I had written it and gotten it done, I'd be retired. 

It's a great product. Amazing support. It's a very good value for our environment, no question. We will not change. This is a good product that does everything we want and more.

We do cloud hosting for our customers, and we do reselling when they want to do VMware on their premises.

The backup of VMware ESX is the most important to us. That's what we use. We use it to back up all of our private cloud, and it's backed up hourly.

We sent a letter complaining about how the lack of customer service has caused us problems. We're actually dumping Vembu and we're going with Veeam, and we're asking for our money back. The thing that needs to be improved most is their customer support. The product itself is fine, but the customer support is basically nonexistent.

Instead of helping us meet new challenges it has actually caused us problems. We wanted a backup solution so that we could quickly back up and recover all of our customer virtual machines. In case something happened to the hardware, we could quickly recover it on different hardware. We looked at different solutions such as Veeam and Vembu. Vembu was recommended to us and we found it to be cheaper than Veeam but, unfortunately, because they're based in India, not in North America, the customer service doesn't even provide phone support.

We had a lot of problems getting it configured in the first place. They also wanted us to allow them remote access to our machines without us watching what they're doing, which is a huge security risk for us. We said we couldn't do that, and they said they don't offer any phone support whatsoever.

The product itself actually works mostly well. One of the features of the product is Application-Aware and that does not work properly. When we tested it with the Veeam product, it did work properly. We tried to get it to work, to get support to help get it working. It went back and forth for about two weeks through email, trying to get help to get this feature working, and it just did not work.

With the Application-Aware setting, the stability was near zero on a scale of one to ten.

As far as scalability goes, everything seemed okay. I would rate it around a seven out of ten.

I would rate technical support at one out of ten. I don't even know why they have a tech support phone number because I was told in an email from a manager that they don't provide tech support over the phone. Every time I call the tech support phone number, I'm told I have to send an email to support@vembu.com. I said that I would pay extra for premium support but they said they don't even offer it.

The initial setup was complicated because of the Application-Aware feature not working.

For someone who doesn't want the Application-Aware feature to work, everything else is up to par. The licensing is straightforward. They license it per CPU. 

One thing to note is that when you configure which virtual machine you're going to back up, if it's on one physical machine, they license it there. If it automatically fails over to a second machine, the license doesn't automatically move over with it. If they could make that a little more streamlined, that would be an improvement.

We did test Veeam. Vembu vs Veeam came in as a lot less expensive, but I guess you get what you pay for. That’s why we have already sent an email to Vembu saying we want our money back.

We looked at a few other products, but we didn't try them all out.

We've already gone ahead and purchased Veeam, and already tested the Veeam phone support while just on a trial. Someone picks up the phone right away and helps you resolve it. They do remote access, but they let you be on the call when they're doing remote access. They never access your machines without your permission, etc., whereas Vembu was the opposite.

My advice would be not to go with Vembu if you're in North America because it's too hard to get ahold of anybody in India.

We were a reseller, but we've canceled that. We've told all our customers that we're not reselling Vembu because of the problems with the tech support and the problems with the Application-Aware feature not working.

I would rate Vembu at three out of ten because for simple configurations it works fine, but overall, their tech support is very poor. Conversations with tech support and the way they handle tech support are very poor. One example is that I was told that they want to access our servers, but that I wouldn't be allowed to be on the phone and watch what they're doing. I can't be sure that they're only accessing what they're supposed to be doing. The other thing is, they don't offer any extended or premium support. Vembu is for a low-end, small company which doesn't want to do much.

We use it for backup and replication. 

We use it to maintain critical data and save it. It suits our needs, is versatile, and the functionality is there.

• It is easy to use.
• It is simple to deploy and maintain.

Vembu is presented more like a multi-platform tool, where you have paper features, VMware, and Hyper-V. I would like to have a different set of products instead of having a single software which does everything. This could be beneficial. 

Nowadays, I don't know of a lot of people who are using tapes anymore. If you are using tapes, you don't do backup to the cloud, for instance. Therefore, maybe have a legacy version, then a cloud plus application version.

It is not a well-known software. People do not know about Vembu.

This is not a high-end product.

There were only two issues, which were minor, and the support was very fast. This is probably the top reason why we chose Vembu. They have a very good support team who are responsive. I like the way they handle their clients compared to big vendors on the market, like Veritas, formerly Symantec.

The two issues were fixed in a relatively short time. One was fixed within the same day, and the other one was fixed within  a couple days. These are the only two issues that we had for the whole year.

We haven't had a chance to experience scalability.

I would give tech support a score of nine out of ten, which is almost perfect for me.

We were relying on Microsoft Backups, which are just basic backups. We were trying to find something simple to use and easy to deploy, and that is why did proof of concept with three different products. The short list came down to Vembu. 

Currently, we are using mass technology, so we store from mass seamlessly. Then, we use the replication feature from VMware to remote that. So, we do double backup. Local backup and remote backup plus replication, which is very accessory resilient.

The initial setup was pretty simple. The backup solution was running within two to three hours. We were maybe missing some technical help during the installation, but there were a couple of technicians who helped me during the setup and finalizing it. 

Overall, the setup is straightforward. When you choose the VM options, it is even faster.

We consolidated our infrastructure. We went from about 40 to 15 servers.

The licencing and pricing are good; it's a no-brainer. It is affordable. It has value with respect to the features included in the software.

There is a drawback in the whole approach about how the licenses are managed. There are two consoles: cloud and on-premise. It seems that on a daily basis we have to manage both consoles, which isn't user-friendly. Ideally, it should be either a single on-premise console or only a cloud console. A single platform approach is the better solution. For now, with full licensing, you have to manage your instances on the Vembu Portal, then reassign licenses, and go back to your on-premise management console to do the real management. It is a bit awkward.

I do remember that the pricing was based on a VMware or Hyper-V license, whereas on our end, it should be regarded as a VM-based license. I don't know why they make a difference at the Vembu level. We are currently on VMware migrating to Hyper-V, and we didn't want to buy licenses for VMware, but still have to buy them for Hyper-V. This the only thing which does not seem fully adequate. 

We previously used Microsoft Backup, which is not reliable.

I have a lot of experience with Symantec Backup solutions, now Veritas. Compared to Veritas, Vembu is more corporate-oriented and the support is better on Vembu's side rather than Veritas.

We also tested Naviko, Veeam, and Unitrends.

Go ahead and use it.