Infrascale Backup & Disaster Recovery Reviews

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.

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.