BDRSuite Backup & Replication Reviews

Our whole environment is virtualized except for a couple of servers which are still physical. So I primarily use this for backing up my physical servers. I do an image backup as well as a file-level backup.

The main improvement is the compression, the space. I back up one particular server with close to 1.2 TB, and the way the software compresses it is close to 600 or 700 TB. Vembu compresses it to close to 450 gigabytes, that's gigabytes. So that’s really amazing, the way in which the backup compression happens. It creates a lot of space in my storage. I’m saving almost 50 percent of my file storage space, SAN. that’s one of the key features of this.

One thing I’m very much impressed by is the compression ratio. The rate at which it compresses the data during backup is really very good. In fact, I’d say it’s better than Symantec Backup Exec. I have Backup Exec, in my environment, and I have Veeam. Symantec is now Veritas, so I have played with all the backups, but the way in which this handles the compression is really one of the key features.

It’s also very, very stable. I haven’t made any changes to it. I just installed and it’s working. I restored a couple of times, and everything seems to be fine.

I do have one suggestion for them. The process is a bit cumbersome when you remove an agent, delete that job, and add the agent to the same server. Even though the agent is already installed in that server, the system does not recognize it. We have to uninstall the current agent, restart the server, install the push agent - a new agent - and then restart the server. I think they should try to avoid that. Symantec doesn’t work that way. You push the agent once, the agent stays in the server for good.

It’s very stable. I don't have any issues because it’s automated. The moment a backup is completed we all get an email. First thing in the morning, we check those emails and it’s on top of it.

I’m not going to scale with this because I’m primarily using it for physical servers.

Maybe my next project will be, when my Veeam support runs out, to try using Vembu - because Veeam is very expensive - for backing up my virtual servers and let's see how things are going to work.

Support is very good. When you call them or send out a support email, immediately someone responds. It’s really good. They come back with an answer immediately. There has never been a time where they said they wanted to do some research on it. The moment I send them an issue, the guys fix it immediately.

Before Vembu I was using Symantec (which is now Veritas). The main reason I switched is the price point, the cost. Vembu cost me one-third of what Veritas was charging me for backing up the three servers.

The setup is straightforward. The only problem is, if I delete the server from my backup list and I want to add the server back, that is complex.

It is very cost efficient, effective. I’d say it's one-third the cost of Veritas when compared to the server backups. I even tried image backups on Acronis, but Acronis is very expensive. So these are some of the key reasons why I opted for it.

Licensing is straightforward, it’s simple, they should keep it the way they have right now.

There is no need for any advice. A person who has infrastructure and backup experience should be able to do it. It doesn’t require any special knowledge for the configuration part or reinstalling.

I rate it at eight out of 10 because of the complexity involved in reinstalling that agent.

Buy, install it, use it, back it up, that’s it. It works fine.

Primary use is for vSphere or VMware.

• Ease of use
• Configuration
• Support

Live support would be helpful. I've communicated with them via email and through incidents. It might be better if you could have a chat or phone call because backups are important. You don't want to wait for an email. I know of other vendors that have a number you can call; they have people around the clock. It would be good to have a number you can call and your call is answered and taken care of, because backups normally occur at night, not during the day.

I would also like to see more documentation or videos. They have some videos out there on how to do steps, or for training, or to help you know more about their product.

Another leftover issue is that when you get notifications via email on an iPhone, there is only a certain amount of space to view it without having to open the email itself. I have four backup jobs. Their subject line shows "Vembu backup software..." and at the very end they put the server name and whether it succeeded or failed. I asked them if they could put the server name, and whether it succeeded or failed, first. That way, when I look through my emails it tells me whether it's succeeded or failed, and which server. Currently what I have to do is open up each email, and then scroll through to the very end, because it's a very long subject line. They say it's not customizable, and that they are going to look at improving on that in the future.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

I have enjoyed the support. They're very quick in turning around solutions for the issues and problems that I have had. You get a good turnaround. It takes a little while, but they document it. You can log in to their website and create a ticket, and see in real-time if it has been updated. It's really nice.

We went from a physical server to a virtual server. Vembu is cost-effective versus using VMware Essentials.

The setup wasn't altogether straightforward. There were a lot of items. It took me about two weeks before I could finally get things the way I needed them to be.

The product's pricing is a good value. Regarding licensing, make sure you find the right workstation or server that you're going to install it on, and know the number of sockets it has, since the price depends on that.

VMware Essentials, it has backup and restores capabilities. We also used BackupAssist.

Try it with the trial version. You get free rein of everything there. Test it out and make sure everything works right. You'll find it's easy to use and there is good support, as far as emails back and forth. That gives you plenty of time to try it, and then you can implement it once you've figured out all the items and how to get to things, as well as its limitations. That's pretty much what I did. I got a server and installed the full license and went to town. I put some backups on there and got familiar with it. It was pretty much straightforward.

Also, look at some of the training videos. They make it much clearer.

I like Vembu because of the price point, the ease of use, the support, and it being full-featured backup software for the needs that I have. I would rate it 10, but the one thing is the email notifications, that I mentioned above, that aren't customizable. Maybe adding more customization for the end-user, in the settings, some additional options, would help.

Backing up virtual machines, we use it for Windows Hyper-V platform in one data center, but we've also got future plans for a VMware Hypervisor platform in another data center. So thinking ahead, we chose Vembu.

It hasn't improved things, per se. It's an essential service, done automatically. I would say it is an essential backup system that matches the alternative solutions at the moment in a relatively cost-effective way.

The automated backup of multiple virtual machines. We can back up two hypervisors, one is Microsoft Hyper-V and the other one is VMware Hypervisor.

It is very easy, unless you know exactly what you're doing, to corrupt the virtual machines and they get locked up. Just brief detail: When you are creating a system, if you don't have absolutely every other little background processes in place, it creates Snapshots of the virtual machines. Once it does that, it then won't be able to have a backup. From that point on you have to destroy the virtual machine, which is completely counterproductive on a large system. There is a fundamental flaw in the setup that can be very dangerous, potentially. So that needs to be avoided; whoever writes the software for doing that needs to make sure that that cannot happen.

I have fed that back to the developers. I don't know whether they're going to make that change, but they can't put that responsibility onto customers. It's their software that needs to be able to not allow that to happen. I've not had any response to say, "Yes, we'll do it." So that's a little bit of a fault as well. When we do give feedback we don't get any commitment. Like this survey, we're being asked the questions, but when we give feedback, we don't actually get any response at all.

When it's backing up, it's okay. We've used it to restore the system and that restore system worked. We get an email report on various operations, so we know if something has failed or not. It's operating fine.

We've not encountered any trouble with scalability.

Their tech support is okay, but they don't respond in time to sort out the problem. We sorted it out ourselves. We fed back the answer. There wasn't any thank you. There wasn't any acknowledgment. There wasn't even any appreciation of what we'd actually done, something like, "Yeah, yeah, you shouldn't have done that." That kind of thing. Very basic support. There is a willingness to help and respond, but in actually solving the problem, they're not very good at all.

Then, once we did solve it, there was no understanding of what had been done, so it's at that level that it is lacking. This issue was over New Year's time. I was actually on holiday in India. I had to waste a whole day rebuilding a system from a corrupt backup. And again, no support from the Vembu guys, at all. Once we showed them what had been done, again, no acknowledgment that they'd safeguard this in the future.

It has been several months now and I'm not in a position to be chasing them to improve the product in that way. So it's still there, in potential, for future Vembu customers to hit the problem that we had and they might not be as tolerant or be able to fix it. We're an IT company ourselves, so we do understand the nature of the software that they're running and the problems, but there are major flaws in the design at set up time.

We haven't actually switched. We do use Microsoft Azure backup systems. We've used our own online backup systems. We've used in-built data center backup solutions a well, so there are a number of solutions. All of them have their weak points. The Vembu one is working and it's stable.

We had problems, initially in setting it up. There was a major bug and the backup process, it corrupted one of our virtual machines which was a live customer system. That wasn't very good. Now that has been sorted and we know how to avoid it, but at the beginning, it wasn't a good system. It has been fixed and it has been working fine since.

It was supposed to be straightforward but it caused major technical issues that were difficult to fix. They were actually unfixable, the problems. We had to basically destroy live production systems.

Pricing is a good value.

Licensing seems okay. I suppose the more volume you put through the system, it would be good to have a volume licensing discount. We're a managed IT service provider, so we're backing up not just our own systems but all our clients'. In that regard, as we grow, we're putting business through Vembu. There is not any specific partner incentive at all. So that would be nice to see.

Microsoft Azure. I can't remember the others but there were a few; the data center ones, but I haven't got specific names. The in-built ones in VMware.

When you do a search on Google about half a dozen pop up and we looked at some of them. With some of them were put off by their business models. So even before we evaluated them, their business models weren't acceptable. The nice thing about Vembu is the subscription, on a monthly basis. It fits into our business models.

I would tell others looking into implementing this solution exactly what steps need to be done in the setup. I've actually documented it, and I've passed that on to the Vembu guys. Take that, and make sure that things are set up very clearly, not, "There you go, it's very straightforward, it'll take you five minutes." It's not like that at all. The marketing of the setup is so misleading. It can cause a lot of problems. They need to be more honest in the way things need to be set up. That would be okay, that doesn't put people off when you have to go through a process. But just saying it's straightforward and it's simple is a bit of a lie, especially if it causes a lot of problems. So there needs to be more documentation on exactly what to set up in what order, and how to do it and what not to do.

Regarding technical support, sometimes, if you pick the wrong time of day to get through you get this constant "We value your business, we're busy at the moment..." and you can be on the phone for ages because it gets redirected to America. You get the feeling that they're not actually busy, they just have some automated lady giving you a message. Again, that engenders mistrust in the technology. It needs to be not advertised as 24/7. It needs to be advertised with the specific hours that support can be provided. That would help a lot, not just saying 24/7 and then not actually providing it.

It goes to America, but it is actually answered in India. It's all confusing. If it's 3 o'clock in India, we understand that they'll be asleep, so why not say we operate at these times, and people will understand that, rather than pretending redirect to an American number, where you're expecting somebody to pick up the phone. But they're picking it up from India at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's forced us to be hanging on to the phone for a long time, while nobody has got any intention of picking up the phone.

In terms of my rating of the solution, I have to do so on two levels. The first is the implementation and that would be a two out of 10. It was bad. But in terms of once it's operating, I would give it a nine.

It has provided us with a value-added service for our customers, aiding us in becoming a one stop shop for all IT and Communication requirements.

The intuitive GUI, ease of use for doing any type of backup.

The Support for Exchange 2016 mailboxes, a daily report for all customers on their last backup (Current report misses some information)

The Backup solution has been very stable and any issues have been promptly addressed by the Vembu support team.

Customer Service:

Customer service is always excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is always excellent.

We switched to another solution only because vembu were discontinuing the product, glad to hear they continued it and we came back on board.

It was extremely simple to setup and we were working in no time at all.

We advise them to check out other solutions but we are very competitive. We license by server/application and storage allocation.

In-house.

It is between 15–30%

We advise them to check out other solutions, but we are very competitive. We license by server/application and storage allocation.

It gave us an easy to use and stable backup service to offer our customers for a low price.

Central management and easy control of allowed space per client makes end user and client management easy.

The service is built on MCALs, so implement a policy in which someone keeps refilling these. But overall, MCAL is a nice way to be dealing with licenses.

We ran into some problems in which the server hosting the backup service needed to be restarted once a week. We contacted support and they resolved the issue within a week!

We didn’t have any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

We did have a previous solution, but it was almost 10 years ago. We were not happy. The provider and the software didn’t work as we hoped. We called it “one-time-backup” internally.

The setup was straightforward and support was always available if needed.

The cost is low and has always been. We haven’t found any cheaper solution for our demands. By using the MCAL, we feel safe and secure. It is kind of “straightforward” to add new licenses for the backups.

We did evaluate other solutions.

Use the support. They are knowledgeable and will resolve any issues you may have. They will contact you directly so that you have a person to talk to. You can tell that Vembu focuses on customer support.

Another plus is the ease of use for the users. In our environment, we sell it as a service and our customers install the backup-client themselves.

When migrating systems or doing a reinstall, Vembu has a really easy-to-use system to re-implement the backup jobs and rules. Short spoken: The end user experience is great and easy to use!

Our backups are done on a nightly basis. We don’t run out of space on the backup drives; no tapes/hard drives have to be stored or swapped out.

The online backup feature allows me to store my backups off-site without having to physically drive them somewhere.

There have been times when the backup hangs and does not complete possibly due to a connection issue. Stopping and starting the service usually works to restart it. It would be good if there was a way for it to automatically restart.

There have been times when stopping and starting the service did not work and I had to call support. This has not happened recently, though.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is good. They are always willing to help and will see the problem through, right up to its resolution.

Initially, we did onsite backups to tapes and then to hard drives. We switched because we wanted an off-site solution.

The initial setup wasn’t too bad. Once we got everything working, it has been running okay.

It is easy to add products. The pricing is reasonable.

You should definitely consider using this tool, as an off-site backup option.

The biggest improvement has been the ability to allow us as an MSSP to continuously gather extra revenue from this software, so we can use it to back up our clients' data offsite. This is one of the reasons why we enjoy the product and we've enjoyed using it for this long.

When it comes to backup software, one of the biggest things that I use to enjoy about StoreGrid, this changed recently, was the support.

I enjoy the ease of the UI and how simple it is to use compared to other products.

They had a good product and tried to change things by going to a different product. They should have tried to stay with a product that is a proven solution and successful.

One of the biggest things that they lack at the moment, which their competitors currently have, is a hardware device that we can deploy at a client's location. We can have local backup stored on the device and replicate over to our cloud. That's basically one of the biggest concerns that we see for their company that we currently think they are lacking compared to other competitors.

Two or three years ago, they had an amazing support team, especially for the StoreGrid product, which is something that we're currently using. But around a year and a half ago, they brought out a new product called BDR, which from my understanding is horrible. We tried it and didn't like that the support just started going down a bit. They started transitioning more to the BDR side and left the StoreGrid part out.

The system is very stable. It's ideal for our day-to-day basis. I've been using StoreGrid ever since I started working here over five years. It's a good product. We haven't upgraded to the latest patch they've released, and the product still works fine. Overall, we think the actual system software works great. 

I have encountered some stability issues, but certain things are awkward to do when it comes to restoring and pulling data, e.g., cracking Exchange databases, pulling emails, and restoring mailboxes.

I would give technical support a five out of 10, because we've had issues in the past where calls haven't been answered. I do call them a lot and the majority of the times, I'm going to the United States, although I know this company is based out of India, and they have offices here. However, when I call during the weekends I've had the following issues:

• Calls which aren't being picked up.
• Phone rings for hours.
• Calls go directly to voicemail.
• Emergency over weekend where they didn't get back to me for over 32 hours.
• Often takes over two days for me to get somebody on support.

Originally, it seemed like they were staffed for the actual support need, but now it doesn't appear like it. Only in the past few months have I seen minor improvements. I do understand that in the past year or so, there have been some changes.

However, when it comes to knowledge, they're always willing to help; I would say they're always on top of things. As for being knowledgeable, I would rate them as an eight out of 10.

I didn't previously use a different solution. I really don't remember because when I took on this position, the solution was already out here. From my understanding though, we did use a similar solution. It really comes down to pricing.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It's fairly simple and easy, and they make our lives a lot easier when dealing with the licensing and actually purchasing licensing, keeping them in the vault, keeping them in our bank. It gives us an additional way to resell and earn a little extra here and there from other clients. When we do build out servers, backup servers, for them and we have them out on site, we can obviously use the licensing to license their system to obviously mark up and make some money.

Somebody already took on that decision prior to my being here.

Give it a chance. It's a decent product, although not the best of its kind. It is lacking in certain aspects. A piece of hardware being deployed out at a client's office would be ideal. There are a lot of products out there, and it's in the middle of the pack.

On the client side of it, the ease of installing the software and getting it up and running: Each version they bring up, it gets better and better.

• The support side of it
• The usability, the ease of it: It is user friendly. We've tried other software before and it wasn't that great on the user front, but this software seems pretty straightforward.

While it's hard to say, the support side of it is sometimes a bit hit or miss; the tech support. Generally, I would say about 70% of the time, they're pretty good. They're pretty accurate on what we want, and the odd times, I think it’s lost in translation.
We've had a few bugs with the software and, for some reason, we've always had to get their support to dial in to fix it. It's not something that we can fix ourselves, really.

Generally, we have not encountered any stability issues.

So far, scalability seems OK. We've only grown, not masses, with this software, so it's hard to say, really.

Technical support is 7/10, on average. They could make it better by improving the speed of responses. Sometimes, they'll dial us back in a few minutes; sometimes, it takes them half a day before they have a look at it.

We previously used a different solution. The ease of user feel is really the reason we switched over to it.

The initial setup is going back quite a while back. I think it was in the middle: it wasn't too straightforward; it wasn't that tricky. It was average.

It's pretty straightforward to use once the software gets going.