Unitrends Reviews

I've been deploying it for most of my clients because it comes in an appliance model and supports any operating system, including legacy operating systems. Some customers prefer the appliance model rather than just getting the software and worrying about integrating it.

It's been useful for our customers who rely on legacy systems and fail to find backup solutions that are compatible with their legacy systems. For example, in the industrial sector, we have people relying on a system that's running on Windows 2000 for 20 years. Nobody really supports these operating systems these days, and only a very few vendors do that.

Unitrends really has cross-compatibility and a broad area of support for various operating system backups. I like the fact that you can recover the VMs inside the appliance. For example, they're basically running this appliance on a Linux-based distribution, and they're spinning off KVM virtual machines inside. The customer has downtime to his advantage. He can absolutely spin-off some VMs from inside the backup appliance itself to start production or close instantly or as soon as possible.

Unitrends has a unique point in deduplication because it has global deduplication, and it can help make backup sizes much smaller than the software they're using. Because it deduplicates from a storage area and has a feature to recover a VM inside the appliance.

Their technical support is also good. It's actually one of the selling points, and we show the customer that their support is reliable.

becoming software defined rather than appliance based oriented, establishing alllainces with major oem vendors as that opens flexibility on HW

We've been using Unitrends for about a year and a half.

Unitrends is pretty much stable. It's been around in the market for quite some time. It's not very famous around here in the region of Saudi Arabia, but it's a well-established backup company, and they've been well-established in the market. It's pretty safe to say that it's stable.

Unitrends is not really enterprise-ready. It can scale, and there's a lot you can do with it, but it's more suitable for small and medium appliance-based backup solution models.

Technical support was great at the time. They had this chat feature, and they are happy to support you. That's actually one of the selling points, and we show the customer that their support is reliable.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. There's a good interface where you can log in, and you can start deploying it in your business and start backing up the environment and the appliance. In terms of configuration, it's straightforward. The nightmare is racking and stacking the appliance. It's pretty heavy.

The deployment time is relative to the customer's environment. Some customer environments will be very smooth. It won't take much time to deploy and backup the environment. Some customer environments will have some bottlenecks, whether it be on the network or the storage level. Some things can be deployed in minutes, but the challenges are to be faced on site, and sometimes it can cause delays for as long as a month.

We integrate this solution for our customers. It's a 2-person job. We go on-site and implement this solution. You just need to have product training and learn how to deploy it from the portal. You can just go on site and start deploying it. I mean, that really relies on the customer side. If he's an enterprise customer, then you need more than one person. It would help if you had a team to deploy it.

I wouldn't recommend this product to potential customers because it's an appliance-based model, and you'll be locked in with that vendor. You'll have to pay whatever that vendor demands for the hardware. It's always best to go with a software-based solution because it scales, and basically, it's flexible for you to use compared to the hardware-based model.

I heard that they have software now, and you can deploy a software-based model and work with that. You don't need to tie yourself to their hardware. The other thing is the fact that the hardware becomes an area of support. 

For example, I have one customer in the industrial sector. Three years ago, I sold them an appliance, and right now, that hardware is at the end-of-life stage. He needs to purchase new hardware unless he has some agreement with Unitrends, which they call a "pledge agreement." You pay more when you buy the appliance, but in exchange, when you renew their support, if the hardware reaches the end-of-life stage, they'll basically replace it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Unitrends a 7.

We use Unitrends Appliance across our infrastructure to backup both physical servers and virtual machines.

Unitrends is efficient of running virtual machines and Physical servers inside it with a feature called instant recovery. With this, my business critical machines almost will never stop. Unitrends changed my backup window to half the time spent before and the space used too, the de-duplication is very high

The most valuable feature is the technical support and instant recovery.

I would like to see the improve High availability features like switchover and switchback process. also unitrends boomerang compatibilities. 

We have been dealing with Unitrends for about 2 years

great Technical Support. they fixed some serious setup issues and made sure everything backed up correctly.

The initial setup is easy and it can be deployed in a couple of minutes.

we are satisfied with the pricing and licensing options. 

In summary, this is great software and we like a lot of features.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Unitrends is a hardware-based solution that we use for backup and disaster recovery. We are trying it out to get it into our market to sell. 

With Unitrends we can spin up devices into a VM in about five minutes' time. The disaster recovery time is very quick. Even while we are busy fixing hardware, we still have a running machine. That minimizes the loss of service. Something that usually took two hours now takes only five minutes on the server.

The feature I find most valuable is the hardware functionality because it's reliable and it's got predictive analytics and hardware failure. The predictive analytics are great and the reporting is awesome. It is a very reliable product.

Unitrends offers a lot of services and that allows us to seed devices. What we do is to create a backup on site, write it to a disc, courier it to Unitrends and they seed it to the cloud. So you don't need to copy terabytes of data over a line. That's very handy. 

It is all very dependent on what the customer is buying. They can buy a hardware solution or a software solution. We don't particularly like working with a software solution because we don't trust underlying hardware and hypervisors and those type of things.

I will compare Unitrends to a Swiss army knife back up. It offers a lot of ways to do all sorts of things. 

If the interface could be less complex, it is would be great. It's not the easiest to get around and to work with. Someone with a technical background won't have a problem with it, but new people might struggle with the interface complexity.

I would like to see more support for the different major cloud vendors and more focus on the desktop so that I can give a client a single solution for all of their backup requirements. I don't like selling two or three different backup products to cover various needs. I want to be able to provide my client with a single solution from a single vendor.

If you do proper planning, the program is very stable. I think Unitrends is designed for a data center and servers rather than for end-user backups. 

Unitrends is very scalable. You can basically plug in a new device and add more devices as you scale.

Unitrends is not extensively being used here in South Africa but we have a lot of plans to increase usage of the product. It's being extensively used overseas, and it has already appeared in Gartner and the visionary side of their graph and it has a lot of usage in Europe and the US. We're trying to increase the market in South Africa dramatically.

The technical support is brilliant. Unitrends provides what they call a white glove service, where they monitor the devices. They will send people out to either do repairs should something go wrong, or they will send a new device out. Then it's a matter of plugging it in because they do a lot of the maintenance work themselves.

I've used many solutions throughout my career in technical support. We switched to Unitrends because it works and we have started selling Unitrends because it works. It's reliable and it's a very trustworthy system.

I used Backup Exec and other solutions before, but I have found that a lot of them can't be trusted.

We went through a long period of evaluation before choosing Unitrends as a product.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward if the planning is done well. It is very important to realize that it isn't just a plug and play thing. You must do proper planning and get your capacities right. You can't just do a lackadaisical implementation. So it is not straightforward, but it's very well sorted out by the time it goes into production. They do provide templates for the setup and essentially they give you an entire project plan. 

The time it takes to deploy the program will depend on the size of the customer. A small client's deployment will be very fast. But you have to plan first and have to look at the client's capacity, how much they're backing up and how often they're backing up. Then you can cut their RTO's and RPO's down. You must include the business planning, what their objectives are, and then fit everything within that framework. If you try to miss a few steps and wing it, the program won't work for you.

We are vendors for Unitrends. We use Unitrends themselves as part of the deployment and they're very good.

Licensing costs appear high for hardware devices and software, when compared to other solutions. But in the long run, they're not, because you get free hardware replacement after three or five years. It's not an easy comparison, but it is more cost effective in the long run than most other solutions. You don't need new licensing every year.

For hardware devices, you pay a per seat or per call licensing structure. There are no other hidden costs like you have with a lot of other products. The upfront licensing is very simple to understand.

Most of our customers use VM and Backup Exec, but because we are resellers of Unitrends, we also use it from time to time. For end-user backups, we use a product called CloudBerry, which we have yet to actually sell into the market here in South Africa. We focus mainly on the data center and server market.

My advice would be to follow the recommendation when you do the planning and installation. If you don't you're going to run into trouble. For what it's designed for, I will rate this product a nine and a half out of ten. It is pretty much the best product out there for what it claims to do. They've lived up to just about every promise they have made on marketing and on their website. 

We use it to back up our VMware environments. We do daily backups of virtual servers and databases.

It has reduced recovery time. From recovering VMs to just simple file-level recovery. It's all fast and easy.

The daily backup report is one of the most valuable features. There is a clear report sent and emailed to me every morning that shows if all backups were successful.

The only area that I would say needs some improvements is the initial setup. A little more assistance and help during implementation would be great.

It performs as a backup product.

The whole appliance needs to be more resilient. It lost our database, and that is something that cannot happen. If the data was written and managed a little better, we would not lose our entire backup. A bit more thought needs to be put into the process.

There are some questions as to how safely they are storing backup data. We had an issue about a year ago, but it actually ended up wiping our entire backup history, because one of the databases got corrupted, and we couldn't recover the backup data. Six to seven years of backup data just disappeared. So, obviously we weren't too happy. It's one of the primary reasons we're looking at the market and have gone down a different route for backups, essentially.

I also think there should be a lesser focus on the physical appliance, which was virtualized. I'm willing to look at it from the ground up and go actually a bit more resiliency, we don't want to lose the entire database because it took a snapshot of the appliance. This is a pretty common thing. We unravel all this data that's backed up if we need to collaborate.

It's fairly stable, it runs, it does a backup like you said. Things don't tend to go wrong until either VM upgrades or Unitrends breaks with an update. In terms of that it just carries on. It does its job, that's the main thing.

It's scalable to a point. Yes, it is quite scalable.

The technical support team is pretty good, actually. In all fairness to them, they are good. It is not their fault that their products are not functional in all aspects. But, from the support perspective, they did work quite hard to get things working in our favor. They did try their best. We cannot fault the support team for a problem with the product, itself.

I was not involved with the initial setup. It was inherited by me. 

Always look at your backups strategy, and what your RPO and RTO are. Also, understand your infrastructure and the risks involved, including how the backup works.

If you are a large organization or corporation, with multiple sites, you can replicate the data from one Unitrends device to anoter Unitrends divide appliance. Then, this is definitely a solution for you. But, if you are a smaller corporation or organization, and you are worried about your backups, Unitrends may not be your best product choice.

I have no advice about the pricing of the product.

I inherited the product, so I did not comparison shop or evaluate other products.

It hasn't improved our backup because of the signal comeback with their solutions. They purchased RDR, but we don't know whether, I believe there's new functionality now in the current version, but it's not quite there yet. But there's still the pitfall there. If the database gets corrupted you lost access to your data unless it's stored under the appliance. So, you are basically doubling up on your data storage. So, I can't really say much more than that.

We primarily use Unitrends to assist when a file or server level restore/backup is needed. We perform nightly backups of all servers, as well as a monthly backup to disk, which is stored offsite.

Unitrends has helped us cut down the time that it takes to restore a server to its original configuration. Before, we only had the file structure backing up on a nightly basis and were utilizing bare metals. 

Unitrends has drastically cut down on our restore time.

The scheduling and event viewer is easy to use and a helpful item when setting up new servers to be backed up. It determines what errors are being generated as a result of an issue.

The amount of updates which are being released. We were running 9.2 for the longest time when 10 came out. We were advised to upgrade, then two weeks later, we were told to wait. Since version 10 came out, there have been multiple versions released for Unitrends. Updates should be limited to two or three a year, focusing more on quality instead of a rushed bug release.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

One of the best features is the customer service. When submitting online, the techs are quick to return my call and are very patient and helpful in answering all my questions. 

I recently had an issue backing up a specific server (and without sending an email), the tech emailed me at 4 AM and provided a solution to the error which was generated.

Since I have been with the company, we have always used Unitrends.

I do not know.

You should be aware how much the monthly costs are to use, what the initial costs for hardware are, and what the options to expand are, if needed.

We did not evaluate anyone else.

We currently use Unitrends to backup of local on premises environment as well as our Azure VMs. 

We use our local network as an off-site storage for our Azure VMs and replicate our local backups to Azure.

We also have several appliances installed at our customers.  Using the notifications we can easily monitor backups and address any failures quickly.  

This product has given us the ability to remote manage, monitor and report multiple client sites .

We have relied on this appliance several times to recover our clients from Crytpo viruses that have locked their files for ransom.

- Cloud replication
- Remote management of clients
- Reporting
- Iinstant recovery (allows a spin-up of your image as a VM on the appliance).

Pushing the client to Windows 8 and Server 2012, no appliance update notifications, more stable pricing model, no support for dual VPN utilization (required for cloud replication and remote monitoring which cannot be done simultaneously).

Unitrends is very stable.

The product is very scalable however if you are a small company that uses multiple subnets you must purchase a higher end appliance with multiple NICs. The lower end appliance no longer come with 2.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is very qualified and educated.

We previously used 3X and they went out of business.

Initial setup is very easy and straight foreword. You will need to program the Unitrends appliance with network configurations. Next will be installing the client on each workstation. This can be pushed on Windows 7 and earlier. Server 2012 and Windows 8 will require you to visit each workstation.

Configuring some of the advanced features however can be very tedious and difficult. A call to Unitrends support more than likely will be necessary.

We implemented the product for ourselves and a several clients.

How much is your data worth to you?

Pricing model constantly changes.

Before choosing Unitrends we also looked at Veeam, Symantec, Acronis, Backup Assist, etc.

This is a great product. Easy to setup, technical support is great, lots of documentation available. The reports are great to keep your backups working and recovery testing is easy.

We have needed to restore a handful of times already and having Unitrends has been 100% thus far making us look good.

There recently has been a lot of restructuring that has been happening at Unitrends and our common contacts and reps keep changing. They have also switched their sales model and no longer sell direct.

Backup replacement for Backup Exec.  Also, we are replicating backups from one datacenter to another.

VM backup is much faster and more reliable, as I can test my backups with Data Copy Access jobs.

It is very easy to set up and get started. Almost too easy. We racked this device and had it up and running in less than 15 minutes. The racking of the appliance took the longest, as it is heavy.

We have a huge VMware infrastructure with multiple hosts that use local storage. Backup jobs of VMs seem to target one host at a time, so if there are 10 VMs on that host getting backed up, it hammers that ESXi host until sometimes the jobs hang and nothing more occurs. It would be great to have the job throttle/limit the max number of backups on a single ESXi host.

Everything has been stable since implementation.

Not yet.

So far, they have gone out of their way to assist us if there are questions or issues.

Yes, we utilized Backup Exec and a Dell DR4000 disk appliance. We were going to replace the DR4000 with a DR6300, but found that the cost of Unitrends was about the same as the DR6300. We liked the fact that the Unitrends appliance was all-in-one.

Very simple. You just put in a name and an IP address, then browse to the website to get to the console, deploy agents, and start backing it up.

In-house implementation.

Not calculated.

The cost of Unitrends definitely draws you in. The licensing is all included in the appliance, which is a great incentive.

Yes, we looked at Backup Exec and the DR6300, as well as the Dell EMC iDPA 5800. The price of the iDPA was steep and they would not let us demo a unit.

So far, so good. It could be a little more customizable, but hopefully reviews like this and feature request updates that I have submitted move that along.