Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery Reviews

We use it for simple, day-to-day backup of files and of virtual machines. But the overall requirement is to have a system in place that meets disaster recovery and business continuity requirements, which this does.

It is a physical deployment with replication to cloud.

One of the main benefits is that Infrascale reduces the heavy lifting, for me and my colleagues, in terms of ensuring the protection of the client's assets. Much of that is now automated and monitored through the solution, and it's also monitored by the technical folks within Infrascale. 

In addition, if we have any issues, we have points of escalation, by way of the support, that we can contact to assist in resolving those issues.

Given that we are in the hurricane belt, the spin-up of replicated servers in the cloud is among the most valuable features. If our site goes down we can just connect to the cloud appliance, spin up the servers, and we are good to go.

It's also important that the solution’s Critical Server Insurance protects physical and virtual servers, to facilitate 24/7 access to the servers, regardless of the disaster that might have occurred. And it is definitely a key, for us, that this feature allows you to spin up locally or in the cloud, on-demand, and without declaration or extra fees.

The overall ease of use and ease of management of the solution using the Infrascale Dashboard is also very good.

The backup functionality is efficient and effective. It's efficient because of the deduplication during backup and replication, and the encryption of the data makes it quite effective.

There is room for improvement by making the interface a little more intuitive when navigating to recover flat files or an old server.

I haven't pursued the training as much as I possibly should have, so I don't know what is available in that regard. But from my own experience, if there were more self-training available, such as videos, that would be helpful.

In addition, there's always room for improvement with the dashboards. There's a lot of information on the dashboard and, while it is good at the moment, continuous improvement is always a good thing.

We have been using Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery for about five or six years.

It's very stable.

The scalability of the solution is effective, based on the appliances and the way they are sized, as well as the variables that are factored into sizing for scaling.

But in terms of overage, or outgrowing capacity with backups, I have an issue. I've had a couple of clients that, for some reason, have had their backups go over the capacity that we have. Fortunately, that doesn't stop the whole process of backups. But in terms of reducing the data that is stored to bring it back within the limits, that seems to be something that either cannot be done or I don't fully understand how to do it. The situation has come up a couple of times and there's one particular technician who has been very good in assisting, but it's not that we've been able to bring it below the limit. It's just that he has extended the limit and then spoken with the account manager to explain the situation. That is a concern for me.

Technical support is an eight out of 10. It's not a 10 because, on a couple of occasions, I've been put in touch with technicians who seem a little less knowledgeable than others, although these occurrences happened some time ago. I know now that once a couple of particular names come up, I'm in good hands because they are very knowledgeable and very expedient in troubleshooting and rectifying issues.

The level of commitment of the support team to me, as a customer, has gotten better over time. Initially, it wasn't particularly great, but that's in line with what I just said about the experience and knowledge.

The support team is proactive such that I am told if a resolution isn't readily available, and I am given an explanation as to their next steps for going away and researching. The tickets are always updated. And what is important to me is that when I communicate or respond to an email, or raise further information or queries, there is a timely response.

Positive

We did have a previous solution, but the switch to Infrascale was because of functionality that wasn't readily available in the old one. And I don't believe that solution was being continually improved, commensurate with client requirements and industry standards.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The aspect that was a challenge, initially, was the sizing exercise. The sizing has improved since I first used it, but I feel that some technical people might not really understand some of the questions that are being asked and, therefore, may answer them incorrectly. And that could lead to incorrect sizing. That process could always be improved and streamlined.

Other than that, implementation has been straightforward, from the booking of the implementation, receiving of the appliance, and then working with the technicians on the provisioning. That was fine. All of those steps have been good experiences.

I have done several deployments of Infrascale for clients, and overall, they have taken about three man-hours, maximum. That time has been spread over a number of days, but that's primarily based on my availability and the technician's availability.

I've seen the return on value. That's something that I'm working with my clients on, to really understand what value means from an IT perspective. And some of them are readily identifying the value.

For example, whenever there has been a need to recover a file or a server for a client, and they have called me and I have done that within the recovery time objective, they see and understand that that was a lot quicker than what they had experienced in the past.

The licensing structure was changed some time ago and it's a lot more efficient and the price points are a lot better. They're improving and heading in the right direction. 

I believe it's a lot better simply because we are in a region where the clients that we have can't truly be described as small enterprises. They're more like micro-enterprises and, therefore, the price point has to be a lot more compatible or competitive for these smaller organizations, as opposed to larger organizations that can be truly described as SME's.

We looked at some others including Veeam. For us, at the time, the difference in favour of Infrascale was the effective and efficient way that complete virtual machine images would be captured and, on top of that, available for spin-up during failure.

My advice would be to really understand the cost of downtime to your business. That's the first "port of call." You've got to understand the financial cost of not being able to operate the business. That's the way I can actually put a price point on a situation where they are down for five minutes or an hour, in a very crude calculation based on how much they're paying their staff per hour. I then tell them that if their system were to go down for however long, this is how long it would take me to get it back up, saving those costs I calculated for them, as well as possible intangible losses. That's very important because it's all about the bottom dollar.

The speed of the solution’s restore functionality is a 3.5 or four out of 5. So far, we have not really had to put it under a lot of pressure. There hasn't been a situation where a good number of servers have gone down at any one point, to test the load versus performance. But when I have used it in the past, for one server for a small client, it has worked very well.

I would rate the time it takes Infrascale to deliver a boot-ready failover in a disaster recovery situation as a four out of five, because of the manual effort required to make the switch and fire up the failover system. It's not high-availability, which would be automated.

We use it for backups of our data on our servers. So, we use it in a four-hour incremental backup.

I sell it and it makes my customers feel much safer that we have a solution in place for a cloud backup at any frequency they want it backed up. It could be an hour, it could be four hours, it could be daily, it could be weekly. That gives us the functionality of being able to provide that to our clients. With the knowledge that we are safe and if anything should happen, our data is in the cloud, may it be a fire on-premises, or anything, we can't get back in the building, whatever reason, the data's in the cloud. We can bring it down to another computer and away we go. We're good.

The backup solution speed and functionality are excellent. If you have a bad internet connection, your uploads are going to be bad. Mostly, we all have decent internet connections nowadays, so it's not a problem. But, if you have a lower internet connection, it is going to take longer. It all depends on the infrastructure in your business that you're using.

The restore is normal. It can only restore as fast as you can download and it works fine. It's not slower than any other cloud backup I've ever used. So if anything, it'll be faster than the old ones. But, I don't see any downfalls or down limitations there.

The most valuable thing is that it backs up to the cloud, which is good. I've used it to actually restore server crashes. It works for what it's supposed to do. There are no shocks or surprises. It works. It does what it's supposed to. It's perfect.

I just use it as a purely cloud backup, six times a day. It runs every four hours. That's all I use it for. Does it work as a disaster recovery? Yes, in a sense it does. It won't bring back your server because I don't pay for that portion. But it will keep my data safe. So, I always know that in the worst-case scenario, I'll be out four hours of data in that bit, which has worked for me in the past. I've used it. I've restored companies back in an hour, where I've needed just databases and they work. That part is great. 

The overall ease of use and ease of management of the solution using the Infrascale dashboard is excellent. I'd rate it 10 out of 10 because the dashboard is very simple to use. For someone with a technical background, it's a wonderful piece of software to be using in a cloud environment. But if you're not technical, then it might be a problem. It could be confusing for non-technical people. If you don't know what you're doing, you could kind of screw it up.

Any human with two brain cells can do it. It's like anything else. So, once you train a human, they're good. Anybody can do it. Anybody with a competent brain can use it and go with a little bit of technical skill. It might be confusing in the beginning, but once you're trained up and you've used it a little bit, like anything else in your life, it'll be easy. They'll come as normal.

I can't really think of anything that really needs to be improved from my perspective, because I only use the backup. Maybe someone who is using something else might have a different opinion on that. But for the online backup and recovery tool, I'm not going to say there's anything that needs improvement. They can always improve stuff. But from the top of my head, I can't think of anything. It does what it needs to do. That's it. It doesn't need to do anything more than what it does and nothing less than what it's doing.

The Infrascale dashboard when it comes to centralized deployment and configuration is excellent. I have no problems with the solution. They could always make it better. They can always make the GUI a little bit nicer, the interface level a bit better. There's always room for improvement, but there's nothing on the top of my head that's saying, "Hey, this is what needs to be fixed." But, the programmers are probably working on their own things. So, there's always room for improvement.

I have been using it since July 2017. 

I haven't seen it go down yet. It's a really good program, a really good hosting system for online backup. I haven't seen it crash yet or I didn't even believe there's been a maintenance window where I've been down there, there may have been one. In four years, I have not seen any issues with the reliability of their hosts or anything. If I email them, they get back to me right away. So, it's pretty good.

Scalability is excellent. You can scale it as far as you want or scale it back as much as you want it to. 

We have from small businesses all the way up to multi-international companies. It all varies. There are places that have 10 sites running across America, the United States, and Canada, there are sites that only have two computers. So, it varies. We have from the top to the bottom. But in regards to Infrascale, they work perfectly. I may have multiple servers, but each server does its own backup and stuff. I don't have a problem that way. We're good.

Their support is good. They're excellent. There's no problem. They respond they get back to me. I've never had an issue.

I would rate their support a nine out of ten. Not a ten because they've had some issues.

It was easy to set up. I had good people to help out in the beginning with me to get set up. And after that, it went pretty smoothly. I had no problems.

The Infrascale guys helped out a lot in the beginning. They got me set up and that was it. Away I went and no problem. Not a hassle. I've also been using IT for a long time, so that could help. They were really helpful. It was not a problem to get hold of them.

They had me set up in days, I believe. It wasn't very long. Infrascale had been set up with the platform on the backend with the server and the host and everything and got me set up with my dashboard. And from there, that was maybe a couple of days. They trained me one day for a few hours, I think an hour or two and that's it. They answered any questions and away it went. So from there on, it was just me deploying to my clients, which is totally different.

In terms of the deployment strategy, I was on a cloud backup that was expiring. We do preventative, proactive maintenance on all our clients. Depending on what kind of schedule they're on, either they're on a two-week, weekly, monthly, or three months. So, as their schedule came around, we actually transferred or migrated them over to the new cloud backup solution, eliminated the old one, and away we went. We manage all our clients and everybody has basic lines that they take care of and everybody knew that this was on the agenda. As they send out their weekly notes to the managers on the site when they said they're going to do the work, it was in the scope of work for that week of maintenance and away they went and did the job and that's it. 

I see a 100% return on investment. I make a bigger profit on it, not huge profit.

I charge 37 cents more than what I pay. I paid 30. I surcharged, I tripled my profit on it.

I evaluated other solutions and found Infrascale to be the best fit for what I needed. I looked at Amazon, Google, and a whole bunch of other smaller companies.

Infrascale had the ease of availability and the backup is branded with my company. So, that's always a bonus where you can brand the software. I probably could have branded it elsewhere too, but the cost was a little bit higher everywhere else. These guys seem to be the most cost-efficient at that time. I won't say today, but I'll say then they were the most cost-efficient. Today, they are not as cost-efficient as many other places, but I'm comfortable, I trust the service. That's why I haven't moved anywhere. I know I can get a cheaper price elsewhere, but it's not always greener on the other side. So, I stick to what I know best at the moment.

Infrascale is the best way to use a backup disaster recovery for your business, be it small or big. You have so much control and you can ration your storage any way you want. There's no one holding you back. If you want to add or decrease, it takes seconds. You will log in, you decrease their amount, away you go. Do you need to get something? Reset a password? Away you go. It's a very handy tool. You don't have to call. I never have to call Infrascale for anything really. I think I called them two or three times in four years.

If you want something that works and is reliable, here it is.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. The software just works perfectly. I'm not going to say anything bad about the software because they make me money.

We are an IT support company, so we resell IT and support services. It is our customers who have installations of disaster recovery appliances and cloud backup solutions.

We are our customer's IT support company. We are the ones who implement and support it. Our customer pays the bill, but we do all the support, looking after it. I do not back my own data up on Infrascale, but I definitely back up my customers' data.

We sell and support two products for our customers. We have four disaster recovery appliances onsite that then back up to the cloud from the appliance. We also have quite a few people on just the cloud backup. So, we use cloud backup and DRasS, which is disaster recovery as a service.

When there is an appliance-type installation, which is a physical hardware installation, we go to the site and install a piece of hardware. That piece of hardware communicates with their servers onsite. Their servers are hosts with virtual servers built onto them. The complete virtual machine is backed up maybe twice or three times daily to the hardware appliance provided by Infrascale. That could then become a replacement for the server, if the server had a physical problem and needed to be shut down. We can turn the physical server off onsite, go to the appliance provided by Infrascale, boot up the virtual machine on the appliance, and then it would run the business as if the server were still running. So, it is hardware redundancy for the server.

It backs up the virtual machines, backing them up and all the files. So, it can be a data recovery tool as well. Also, if the entire building burnt down, we could jump onto the version in the cloud, boot that up, and people from all around the world could log into that server to carry on working.

Imagine an appliance, similar to installing a second server, that backs up a virtual machine to the appliance. It has disk space on the appliance, then it backs up that virtual machine from the appliance to the cloud. Our cloud is based in the UK, which is also provisioned by Infrascale. So, we implement that sort of system, which is a little bit like SaaS, but it is a disaster recovery solution. We also have cloud backup, which is a software installation to a server, that then backs up certain files and folders through a cloud provision somewhere in the world.

We are the actual customer because we sign for these products, and our customer doesn't. We are the actual people who lease these things from them.

Now, if one of our businesses has an issue, I am confident that we would be able to get them booted and running within a couple of hours. It would affect their business, but it is a disaster recovery scenario, so there has obviously been a disaster. 

The recovery of data is the most valuable feature. The software backup, which is just a program that gets installed on a server, can back up to the cloud. You can install that on a server or PC, and that will simply back up a user's files and folders. If it is installed on the server, we just back up the relevant data. Recovering that, if there has been a malicious attack on a business or anything like that, has been invaluable in the past. The good features about that are obviously, if the physical hardware has a problem, then we can utilize the appliance, turn on the virtual machine, and carry on running the business while we put the hardware back and correct the issue.

The Boot Verification feature gives you a snapshot picture to tell you what would happen if a virtual machine was booted. From that, you can tell whether the backup was successful. 

I find the dashboard fairly straightforward. It is fairly in-depth from day one. The more you use it, the more you get used to it. I find it fairly straightforward now for making some limited changes that won't really cause any problems. It has a good user interface.

The speed of the solution’s restore functionality is very quick. It works a treat and does the job perfectly. I don't think we have ever come to the point of thinking the product isn't quick.

We did have a major problem last year in March. Somebody attacked some servers being supported by Infrascale and managed to wipe the servers as well as wiping the appliance. However, they didn't manage to wipe the cloud. So, what was on the cloud had to be downloaded to the appliance again. The customer was probably down for about three days. This was a very difficult situation for us to be in.

I think somebody had accessed the server, could get onto the appliance, and see what it was because we had saved the password. Now, I know better than to save the password. Also, the password was still the default password. With the new implementation, it makes you change the password so you can't keep the default password. However, four years ago, when we implemented it, the default password was still on that appliance when that appliance got wiped by somebody.

While this would be a very worst-case scenario, I don't blame Infrascale for the amount of time that it took. However, it was difficult for us because we were trying to placate our customer, which was difficult, because they have a 25 million pound turnover business. They were not happy, but we are still working with them. 

I think I'd be more confident now dealing with the problem. Plus, we monitor the systems more closely. Whereas, previously, I presumed that everything was going well without really checking. Now, I have learned that I need to be on top of any issues. So, I am checking the appliances and cloud solution backups daily. So, we are a bit better switched on with supporting it.

When you are ordering hardware appliances, they have to be delivered from America. In the past, hard drives on the appliance have been simple SSD drives that are installed. However, they don't have a local supply for the SSD drives in the UK. They have to be exported from the US, arrive, and then I have to go and install them. Then, they will rebuild it from their side of things. However, I could order that same SSD drive online and get it the next day. So, I have to wait days for things to come when I could get the exact same drive the next day in the UK, if I wanted to. That causes a bit of a problem. I don't know how many businesses they have in the UK, but I do think that having to import stuff from the US is a time-consuming problem. If there was a holding in the UK, then we wouldn't have that delay in time.

When they export stuff to me from the US, invariably the delivery company (called DHL) is looking for EORI numbers that we don't have. So, they try to involve us in the export of it, and it has nothing at all to do with us. We are simply the customer. If I had to moan about anything, that would be it.

Where the dashboard is concerned, I am okay with it. I am looking at one now and understand what I am looking at. When you first get in it is difficult, but I do believe that they now offer certain training for it. Given the fact that we are trying to support our customers in the UK, it is good to have the knowledge about it, know what you are looking at, see what the size of the protected bytes are, and understand it a little bit better. I have been doing IT support for implementations for the best part of 30 years, and it took me a bit of time to get my head around some of the way things are done.

I have been using Infrascale for over four years, since April 2017.

It is very stable. I have never had any problems with the software. If we install the software on anything, it does what it says on the tin, which is that it will run a backup at a certain time. 

There are some issues with the software backup. Those issues are it cannot back up from an installation onto a server nor can it back up redirected folders on a server. Because when you install the software onto the server. you are installing it as an administrator on the server. However, an administrator account on a server does not have access to a user's redirected folders. 

The user is actually the owner of that folder on the server, even the administrator can't break into that. While you can force your way in, it basically breaks the policy, so we don't try to do that. If we had to, we could. However, out-of-the-box, installing software onto a server, it does not back up people's redirected folders. Now, if you are a user that saves a lot of files and folders onto their desktop, you get redirected back to the server. Essentially, you are missing quite a bit of data to be backed up. So, we do get a lot of errors based on that. We have found a little bit of a workaround. However, that workaround doesn't always work either, causing problems.

I check daily that the backups have gone through. If the backups aren't working correctly, I log onto the appliances and check why the appliances haven't backed up correctly. If it is something that I don't quite understand, then I will pass that down to the support at Infrascale. Where the appliance and cloud backup are concerned, there is very little maintenance to do. 

We have had problems with this. Again, this is down to us not really understanding the product in the first place. In the case of the company, where we had problems with last year, when it came to bringing the VMs onto the appliance, we had to download them from the cloud. We got the VMs back onto the appliance, then we found that trying to boot them and the hardware was insufficient to support their product. So, the product ran like a dog when it was booted up on the appliance. So, it was unusable for the customer. That was down to us. When we were trying to size the product, it was a misunderstanding of, "What would be the minimum that would allow this server to run?" Well, we know that the minimum a server will run on is 8 GB. However, when the customer's product is on there, 8 GB is insufficient to run the server. So, it caused some problems.

One of our companies, who has had the product for three years, is at the point where I don't think the appliance has now got enough space to back up what they have. The only way that we can do anything with it is to keep getting rid of backups, which we probably shouldn't do, but that is what we are going through at the moment. So, we have to really micromanage the backup that is happening so it doesn't go over. The customer could upgrade it, but our customer isn't realistically going to put his hand in his pocket and pay any more at the moment.

For all the people that we have on it, we have six terabytes of space in the cloud for the cloud backup solution as well as four appliances. I am the one who looks after all of it. I monitor it, and if there is a problems, then I deal with it. The guys who work for us run the IT support side of things, and I look after the backup side of things.

We have a couple of thousand endpoints. We are quite a small IT support company.

I am perfectly happy with the support that I receive from Infrascale. The technical support is very good. I deal mostly with one guy there called Maxim. He understands what the issues are and is very helpful. I mostly deal with one guy there, who is fantastic. 

They work in the Ukraine, so there is a little bit of a language barrier. When we first started working with them, I found it very slow to get my message across. Things have improved. What they have done is given a certain person for me to always deal with, which suits me and I'm happy with that. You develop a bond with the person and know that they understand your systems. Previously, when we first started, we could get anybody. Then, we would have to go through the same process of explaining things all over again. To start with, it was like pulling your own teeth out, but now it's improved.

They are proactive to the point that Maxim will check my system. If he sees something he will log a call with his own support desk. He phoned me up the other day, and I said, "Hello Max, how are you doing?" He said, "Yeah, good." I said, "I've seen a ticket was logged, but I haven't logged it." He said, "No, I logged it for you. Because I noticed something was getting high, and I wanted to have a chat with you about it." That is great, because that is proactive monitoring.

When we first started to do the appliances, I really didn't understand what the service was. I thought it was a managed service for backups. I didn't realize that it would be me who would be managing it. But, the more I have been involved in it, the more I have become accustomed to managing all of its appliances and installations. I take the responsibility for making sure that it works. Support-wise, it has improved. I have seen the business improve over the last 12 months. I think the business got sold or bought out. However, there have definitely been recent improvements with the support.

If I am ever going to do anything that I think is outside of my remit, I will contact support and go through one of their support guys.

Nobody from Infrascale has ever phoned me up and said that they want to test anything.

We used Veeam Backup. Mostly, we would use Windows Backup to USB drives.

I switched to Infrascale because I wanted a solution that gave me what I was looking for. Backing up to the cloud directly from your server causes slowdown. I wanted something that would allow me to have an item onsite where we could quickly back up, then slowly back it up as needed for it to be in the cloud, as long as it did the job. I checked online, had a look at what customers were using, and read through some stuff for Infrascale. It just clicked that it seemed to have what I was looking for. So, I contacted them and never had a problem. I did the due diligence myself, so I am happy with it.

Now, the initial setup is simple. Years ago, when we first started, it wasn't simple.

I installed an appliance yesterday and had it installed within an hour. From the box to the customer's site, it was installed and ready for the next stage. Then, one of the implementation guys from Infrascale gave me a call, and we liaised with each other because they like us to set it up. 

They tell me what they would like me to do. Now, the setup is much easier than it was when I very first had an appliance. It seemed to take forever when I first had an appliance. However, yesterday when I did it, it took no longer than an hour.

Because I have implemented these a few times now, I have a bit of knowledge based on some of the things that you come up against when it comes to making it all work exactly the way you want. There were things yesterday that I knew we should check to make sure it was working, because a couple of the backups failed to start. I actually told the guy at the other end, "Let's try this." So, we tried something and made it work because of the knowledge that I have built up. It is a lot easier than what it used to be, because it used to be difficult. Now, out-of-the-box, it is fairly easy.

When we install a hardware server, we build that hardware server with virtual machines on it. The hardware physical server would be clustered at the host with Hyper-V installed on it. Then, we would build the virtual machines on it, and those virtual machines are essentially the servers that are onsite. For customers of a certain size, we wouldn't suggest this because it is quite expensive for our customers per month. It is a fairly expensive product. However, for customers of a certain turnover, we would suggest this. We would explain to them in full what the disaster recovery solution offers. What we say to our customer is, "Our backup strategy would be to backup between two and three times a day, which would be before business starts, as business ends, and during business hours." So, any one of those would be bootable and the files are recoverable from three sections of each day. So, that is our backup strategy, which is really based on the appliance. 

I help with the implementation. In fact, I implemented one yesterday with some of the guys. Sergei is the implementation guy. So, we did an implementation of an appliance yesterday. I do a lot of the support for my customer, utilizing the support services of Infrascale. I deal with a guy called Maxim on a lot of cases. I deal with it directly with the guys at InfraScale. 

They have never physically tested any of our systems. Infrascale has never tested anything. I have never had a phone call with them to say, "We want to run some tests on something." We have installed the stuff, but they have never tested it. There are no tests.

I make sure that this all works. While it does cost a lot of money, it is a good service. I am well bought into what it can do, because as much as it protects the customer, it protects me as well. If we had not had this solution 12 months ago, then the company that we support would no longer want us to work with them, because they would have nothing at all. So, it saved us.

We pay 600 pounds per month for six terabytes of cloud storage and backup. This is a fixed cost of 100 pounds per terabyte.

We pay 752.50 pounds for two appliances, one of them costs 301 pounds per month and the other one costs 451.50 pounds per month. 

Another appliance costs us 327.60 pounds. 

The newest appliance that we installed yesterday is costing us 511 pounds per month because it has better speed and memory. 

The appliances have different prices because of storage, size, and memory. For example, the older machines support more virtual machines, whereas the new one only supports one virtual machine. As we have purchased the later appliances, they have probably been a little bit more expensive because they have to be good enough to keep the business running if the physical server goes down. We learned our lesson from the one that went down when we tried to run products and it wasn't quick enough.

I push it in my own business. I wouldn't do that if I didn't think it was any good. I would definitely advise others that it is a good product.

If you want to back up redirected profiles on a server, you have to go into the scheduler and change the event in there to be a system event, and not run it as an administrator. That is the best thing that I learned, because that enables you to back up redirected folders. However, if you sign up for Infrascale, even they don't know that. So, you can get it to work, but it takes a bit of messing about to do it. If I had to say to somebody, "Get Infrascale, put it on your server, you can back the data up, and then you can back up the user profiles. You will need to go into the scheduler and change it for the task to run as a system event, and not as with administrator rights. It has to run as a system, and it will then work."

The speed of Infrascale’s backup functionality is good. I have had no complaints. The speed of backing up to the cloud using the software solution is based on the speed of the server at one end, how quick it can run the program, and the upload speed of the site. Realistically, that has nothing to do with the solution provided by Infrascale. Where the appliance is concerned, because the virtual machine is backed up to the appliance, there is no lag on the servers from the appliance, which then backs up to the cloud. That is based on the speed of the customer's bandwidth, because that is how it gets into the cloud. Solution-wise, I think the speed of it is just fine.

The speed of recovered documents is more based on a customer's broadband.

After a few weeks, anyone working with Infrascale should really understand the product, and it should be fairly straightforward. 

We offer it to all our customers. It depends on whether they are prepared to spend any extra money on the solution. So, any new customer who comes onto us, we suggest that they have an offsite cloud data backup that will protect their data only in the cloud. Then, should anything happen, it's recoverable to a drive and we would be able to give it back to them. Backup is a service, and it's also something that they can do themselves locally. We do try and get as many customers onto it as possible because it helps us.

There is a slight language problem. It is a bit hard for people to initially get used to, because support is in the Ukraine. I think the language barrier would mark it down one point, but it is a nine out of 10 for me.

Our primary use case is Disaster Recovery as a Service.

In general, disaster recovery is part of providing a comprehensive IT solution. We work with a lot of organizations in the medical industry and they have to have 24/7 uptime. Having the disaster recovery failover helps our customers meet compliance requirements and also provides continuity of care. We're taking care of people as well as taking care of business.

We have had occasions where our customers experienced a hardware failure and we've been able to leverage Infrascale to allow them to keep working while we remediate the issue. It also provides protection in the event of ransomware. Thankfully, we haven't been impacted by that, but our customers have an assurance that if they do get hit with ransomware, that they don't have to make that hard decision of paying the ransom, which we would not advise them to do.

The most valuable feature is the ability to boot locally, as well as in Infrascale's cloud. This means that we can either do on-site failover or failover to their cloud.

We would like to see more of the hardware appliances using solid-state drives versus mechanical drives so that the speed of backups and speed of restoration is faster. I know that that actually is an option that they are rolling out on some models, so they have started implementing that.

Having greater options for the geographic diversity of the data would be a good feature. Right now, we're just replicating to a single data center. But if that data could then be replicated to a second data center, that would be a value add. It provides a little bit more security because they have, in the past, had data center issues. When this happens, the offsite backups are just taken down. Having options to replicate between their data centers, once the data is offsite, would be an improvement that they could make.

One feature that would be really nice, would be to have the file and folder backup agent that is on-premises able to back up to their Infrascale cloud. As it is now, there are two different steps. Adding this capability would give us one solution to manage all of the different services. For example, having the DRaaS appliance be the central means of managing would be really valuable. As it is now, they have the cloud backup product with its own software agent and its own UI, in addition to the DRaaS appliance. Merging them into one platform would be preferable.

We started working with the Infrascale Platform in 2017, five years ago.

Overall, things have been very stable. Within the last six months or so, there have been significant improvements in stability. Maybe a year or year and a half ago, there were some concerns, but those have been addressed.

We have adopted Infrascale 100% in our environment. The system is definitely scalable; it can scale much higher than anything we have to deal with.

We have 13 network technicians that regularly work with the product.

Infrascale as a company and they're the representatives, both on the sales side and on the service side, are all really good people. They're easy to work with. They're responsive when we have issues, the support is taken care of quickly, and they're very customer-first.

I no longer deal with technical support directly but I review the tickets when we've had to submit one. They've recently overhauled their ticketing system and it seems that our support requests have been handled quickly and efficiently.

Prior to Infrascale, we worked with Accelerite.

Infrascale offered a much more progressive solution. Accelerite was really phasing out their MSP offering. The support was getting poor. The solution just didn't work very well. It wasn't a modern solution, and Infrascale offered a modern solution at a competitive rate. 

The initial setup is straightforward and they made onboarding really easy. When we engaged with them, there was a great deal of time spent going over the existing fleet that we were migrating to them, and a deployment plan was created.

We worked out which we were doing first and then second and third, and so on. Deployment was done in phases. So, we never really bit off more than we could chew. There were progress updates and I thought that things were very well coordinated. Also, the onboarding tech that was assigned to us knew the product very well. 

We have on-premises machines that replicate to Infrascale's cloud and we onboarded approximately 60 customers to them. These clients were all geographically and vertically distinct and as I recall, it took between six and nine months to complete the deployment for all of them.

We have absolutely seen a return on our investment. Simply, we are able to be profitable in reselling their service.

The pricing is fair, and they are interested in working with MSPs as part of their market. The model is flexible and it integrates with our billing system, so it's an easy choice for us to use them.

We evaluated a couple of solutions, one of which was Datto.

Infrascale was just more willing to work with us and really evaluated what we needed as an MSP. Versus the others that were just basically saying "Here's our solution, take it or leave it."

Infrascale customized the product for us but more in terms of how it was sold, as opposed to how it worked. They worked with us on the pricing model, as well as integrations with our CRM software so that we could bill our clients for the service.

Overall, this product is really solid and they're a very good company to work with.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are a managed services provider, so we use them in multiple environments.

In our company, we use it as our backup and disaster recovery solution. We have an on-premises appliance that all of our servers and data backup onto. That replicates out to the Infrascale cloud data center and then from there, we have both our on-premises and offsite backups.

If anything were to ever happen in the buildings, we can spin up on either appliance, on-premises, or on the cloud, depending on the disaster, and get us back up and running. That's pretty much the same model we use for all of our partners that are out there. We have between 30 and 40 different partners that we're using Infrascale products on.

We do not have many disasters but when we do, our recovery times are significantly less than they used to be. I would estimate recovery time to be less than a quarter of what it was previously. Ultimately, this leads to less downtime for all of our partners.

The most valuable feature is disaster recovery, where we have the ability to boot up VMs quickly in a disaster. It gives us the option to have the on-premises and cloud appliances boot up if anything ever happens to one of our on-premises servers. 

The pricing model that they recently changed to is a little bit complicated, and the biggest area for improvement is a better way of figuring out how to price it. It would really simplify it for us if the pricing model were put back to the way it used to be.

We have been users of the Infrascale Platform for approximately two years.

Overall, it has been pretty stable. We haven't had any problems as far as the stability of the appliances goes. It functions and does what it needs to do.

This is a pretty scalable product. We started with just our deployment in our office and now we deploy these out pretty quickly to our end-users. If growth happens from a partner standpoint, which is good, Infrascale helps us out with that. They make sure that we have whatever upgraded equipment we need, which is all part of the agreement.

We have four people that are the primary ones who work on Infrascale. They're our NOC services team and they manage our toolset and proactive stuff for our customers. Included in the team is their primary backup person, who uses it on a daily basis. The role includes double-checking everything, making sure we're not getting any errors, making sure everything's getting backed up, and things like that.

About 50% of our customers are using the full IBDR solution. We have some stragglers that are using an old legacy solution, as well.

We talk quite a bit to their support, just to make sure we're staying up to date. We are pretty happy with support overall. They're very responsive when we do have questions and not just support, but our whole account team.

Every time I have a question, I just send an email out and I get a person on the phone quickly. Their account management and support are both very good.

Prior to Infrascale, we were using ShadowProtect. We started to run into some issues with the way it functioned, and its scalability to a certain extent, which is why we switched.

It's a pretty straightforward process to get set up and running. Their team supported us through the first couple of deployments and we're able to get them going pretty quickly now.

The deployment we use is an on-premises appliance and then we also have the cloud appliance on the backend.

During the initial setup, you plug in the appliance and then there's a Hyper-V agent that gets installed on our Hyper-V host. It pulls in our VMs and starts backing them up. The deployment time is really not bad at all. We can get an entire site backed up and deployed and done in a day. This includes having it fully backed up in the cloud, in most cases.

Our in-house team is responsible for deployment and the vendor supports us, as needed.

The licensing is based on how much data you have plus what appliances you need. We find it more difficult than the old model, which was based on straight per-terabyte pricing. They still try to break it back to per-terabyte, but in its current form, it makes it a little more difficult for us to quote for our partners.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We looked at a couple of different solutions before implementing Infrascale. These included Veeam and Datto. All in all, the packaging of Infrascale is why we settled on it. There was no large upfront cost to buy a big appliance, as Datto would have given us. In the case of Veeam, we would have had to provide our own hardware.

Datto is probably the closest thing we looked at to Infrascale. The biggest con to Datto versus Infrascale is that there are upfront costs to get your appliances set up, which could be a pretty big cost for your customers. In the case of Infrascale, there are no upfront costs. It's all built-in.

If I was going to say one downside to Infrascale, it's the three-year contracts, but I understand why they have to do that. With the no upfront costs, they have to make sure they're going to get their money back too.

In the case of Veeam, it is just the software part of it. It is not an all-in-one solution. You have to provide your own hardware and cloud, whereas with Infrascale, the all-in-one one solution that just took care of it all for us.

I would tell anybody who is interested in Infrascale to use it. This is a good product and I recommend it. My advice for anybody who is implementing it is to make sure they utilize the Infrascale resources that they have available. Their tech support and account management teams are among the best we work with and have been super helpful.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that we should have switched years before we did. This is a solid product, and other than the licensing model, we don't have any complaints.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I have remote users and I needed to be able to back up their stuff. So all my remote people have it. I needed a backup solution that was distributed, just like my workforce. It is 100 percent cloud-based, and fire-and-forget.

I have also set it up for a few of my high-profile users, which includes all of my management team. Because we're a hospital, there isn't a lot of data on the nurses' workstations, so there's no real need to back those up.

The fire-and-forget aspect is the most valuable part, and it sends me reports when I key them up. I also like the portal when I need to dig into it. It's all web-based, so when I'm working from home I can just log in and poke away on it.

Its Critical Server Insurance feature for protecting physical and virtual servers, including Windows, Linux, VMware, and Hyper-V is mandatory for me and it makes me happy. If I had a backup solution that didn't do that, it would not be a backup solution and would not be any good. For example, if something is just backing up Word documents and putting them somewhere, I can get a million products that do that, and half of them are free. But if I'm going to pay for a service, it's got to be automated. It's got to be able to hit all my infrastructure and back up everything I need backed up. If it can't do all that, then I've got no interest in it.

When it comes to the ease of management of Infrascale using the Infrascale Dashboard, it's pretty slick. You smash buttons and check the stuff you want to back up and you pick your deployment. Smash more buttons and it happens.

The speed of Infrascale's backup functionality is fine. I don't notice it running and it doesn't impact the performance of my machines.

They set me up as a vendor, not as a client. So sometimes I end up in the wrong portal and I'm doing vendor things instead of client things, and I didn't realize that right away. Once I figured it out I just changed my favorites on my desktop to go to the client-side. It confused me for about three days, when I was setting it up and deploying it.

I picked up the Infrascale Platform around September or October of 2020, so I've been using it for about nine months.

The stability seems fine to me. I've not had any issues with it yet.

Scaling is fairly straightforward. If I run out of space, I call them and they add more space, and they up my bill.

I don't know if I'm going to add any more clients to it, but that's not because I don't like the solution. It's just because I don't think I need to back up those machines.

I haven't had to contact Infrascale's tech support.

I've used Unitrends and Datto and dozens of others. I've been doing this for 30 years. We used to have 12 or 13 local servers that we backed up and we're now down to two. I didn't need a backup solution that costs $20,000 a year anymore. Since everything is cloud-based for us, I was comfortable with moving to a small, distributed backup solution. I didn't need the big dogs anymore.

The initial setup was very straightforward. I did my whole configuration in less than 30 minutes. That covered the base install, what I'm backing up, who it applies to, and what the general rules are for the backup. Picking the who, what, when, and where took about 30 minutes. Then the actual deployment took maybe 10 minutes per machine, if that. I set up 15 to 20 machines.

The Infrascale Dashboard is pretty and it works when it comes to centralized deployment and configuration of the solution. It's like driving a car. Most of the steering wheels are round. Most of the interfaces are cookie-cutter. They're all the same these days. They have what you need to do and you smash the buttons and you go. I didn't find anything missing or lacking.

My implementation strategy was to make sure I hit my managers, my servers, and my remote workers; to get those things covered. Anybody who is important, I put them on it. We're a small hospital, we've got 10 beds and 100 employees. I do run a couple of other backups on my servers and snuck this one in there as a tertiary. The more backups the better.

I'm a one-man IT shop. I do everything. I manage all vendor relationships that affect computers, our medical machines, and our firewalls, among other things, in any way. But Infrascale is a fire-and-forget solution. That's why I like it. I set it up and I walked away.

You get unlimited clients and buy a bucket of space. In addition to the standard fees there were setup fees.

I looked at some of Datto's newer, smaller stuff. I had a conversation with Unitrends. But since my organization is so small, they wouldn't even return some calls.

Datto had more bells, whistles, and features than I needed. They have the one-touch, instant bootup of a server on a local appliance or the cloud. I didn't need that feature anymore and you pay a fairly good premium for that. That's why I went with Infrascale.

I'm using SentinelOne for my antivirus malware stuff. They're one of the best in the industry. I don't have a lot of events where I need to pull from backup or recover. I just needed a system that I could use to back up my remote users. I'm not too concerned with  Infrascale's malware detection stuff. It was one of those fancy little things they throw-in. As far as the time it would take for a boot-ready failover, it would have zero effect on my operations. My stuff is 100 percent cloud-based, including my EMR, Outlook, and Teams. But I'm utilizing 95 percent of what Infrascale offers, for the package I bought.

Overall, I set it up, configured it, deployed it, and walked away from it. It just chugs away happily.

The best part is the possibility to spill over the lock-ups to the cloud and the spin-up part. I can use several from the cloud. 

I think they could increase security. I would like to see more features for the section on the viruses and maybe another in reference to two-factor authentication.

I have been using Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery for about three years.

The initial setup was straightforward and we received support from the manufacturer.

The licensing for Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery is monthly.

I would rate Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery a nine out of ten.

We are using this solution for backing up our systems to the cloud. Many of the systems being backed up are laptops. We also resell this solution to our clients.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is simple to use.

I would like to be able to limit the bandwidth in cases, for example, where we are uploading the backup. I may want to set it to a maximum of 128kb in the application itself.

I would also like to be able to move from one licensed product to another, and not have to purchase a new license if we want to use additional features. For example, if I wanted to move to the virtual appliance backup and the DR sites, it should be not a new product, but rather something that I can upgrade to and only pay an upgrade fee.

A version for Linux would be an improvement, as we have some users with CentOS and Ubuntu for which we cannot do backups.

This solution is quite stable, and I have had no issues with it.

We have not needed to expand, so I haven't had issues with scalability. We have approximately fifty users.

Prior to using this solution, we were using Acronis. We switched to see what the performance and functionality would be like with this solution.

This solution is simple to set up.

Our licensing fees are billed every four months.

My advice for anybody researching this type of solution is to consider what it is that you need to have backed up. I would recommend this solution for those who are backing up documents for Windows or Mac. However, for Linux machines, this solution will not work. It only works with virtual appliances.

The experience that we have had with this product is generally good. We've been able to restore files when we've needed to. The problem is that sometimes you can use a lot of the bandwidth to upload files. I don't know what the compression is like, compared to others, but I've seen it slow down our connection a bit when it does backups.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.