BDRShield Reviews

We use it for backing up virtual machines.

The ability to back up virtual machines is the main reason I use it.

Vembu software runs on a Windows Server. The Windows Server has to be connected to the internet so it can connect with Vembu’s servers. It has to connect with Vembu. For some reason, if it doesn't connect, it stops working, and I don't know why on earth they do that. They require it to connect to the internet and connect with Vembu for it to continue to function. If the internet is down or if the server can't reach the internet, it stops working after a few days. That's not great because there are some people who want to do backups but they don't want to have their server accessible on the internet.

I think that's a horrible design, but it's purposely built in that way. It's something that they put in the product, and I don't know why they did that. To me, that’s a terrible design.

If you bought a new car in the year 2525, a Ford, and your car had to have a connection to the Ford dealership or the Ford company and the connection stopped, and then your Ford car was going to stop working in three days, what would you think about that? But that's the way this software works. They did it, and it’s a horrible design. That's what I don't like about it.

I have never had stability issues with the product.

I haven't had to scale it. It was a small environment so there was no need for me to scale or grow, so I can't really comment as to the scaling capacity.

Technical support gets an A-plus.

The reason I use Vembu is to back up my virtual machines. You can back up virtual machines manually but Vembu does it automatically. I'd rather have it updated and backed up automatically, without my having to think about it, rather than for me to have to remember to do it every couple of weeks. This is just an automated way to do something that you should do, and that's the reason why I have it.

The previous process I had was to manually back it up, but now it's automatic and I don't have to worry about it.

It was pretty easy to set it up.

When I upgraded my VMware to version 6, Vembu provided me with an update. That was just a continuation of what it did, but at least they provided the update.

I didn’t do an ROI spreadsheet because this is a time-saver. You can't sell it on ROI. You can sell it on the fact that it is a time-saving tool.

Vembu is too expensive because they don't really have small-business pricing. This is a matter of personal opinion. They're going to tell you that they have competitive pricing because there are more expensive solutions in the marketplace, but there are better solutions in the marketplace that are more expensive. Their product is a better fit for small businesses, but they don't price it that way.

I think they're losing a lot of money by pricing it too high. If the alternative is to manually do backups and they start charging ridiculous pricing for their products, they're not going to sell that many copies. That's probably why they don't. They've got a good product, but they price themselves out of business. That's my opinion.

If I were running Vembu, I would have a small-business suite that's priced for small business. I would allow customers to buy it without a partner, just go direct and price it for small businesses. They would make a lot more money, but they don't want to do that. They want to try to price it ridiculously. It's their call, it’s their product. They made it.

I know many companies won't bother at that price. They’ll just do it manually. I know because I know the market very well here, in the US. I don't think Vembu is a US company. I don't know where they're from.

Their product does a good job. It's just not meant for large environments, so they’re pricing themselves too high. That's just my opinion. Someone will come in and force them to lower their price. As soon as another company comes in, does an online version of it or it does a cost-effective version, they’re going to be forced to deal with this if they want to sell more licenses.

There were other options, but I liked this product. I thought it was easy to use so I took it on. I worked for a partner at the time, and I was going to try to resell it, but I found it to be just too expensive.

The other solution that seems to do better for enterprise customers, the big companies, like Trader Joe's, big retail outlets like that or large grocery stores or hospitals, is Veeam. Veeam costs a little bit more. As expensive as Vembu is, Veeam is actually a little bit more. But because Veaam is meant for larger companies, they sell more instances of it. And by the time you buy the 25-license or 30-license version, it's actually cheaper.

Veeam seems to have much more presence in the marketplace because it's more competitive and scales much larger. I've used Veeam and it's harder to install it, it's harder to get it working. Veeam offers a free version and a small-business solution, but that version doesn't scale well. It's too big. It's like selling a truck to a person who needs a small car. That’s Veeam. Whereas Vembu, they sell a small car, but they want to price it like the huge truck.

Try to negotiate the price. Try to get it to the right price. As a partner, I would try to position it for small and medium-size businesses. I would work with Veeam and say, “Listen. I can't sell it at that price. You're going to have to be more competitive.” As a partner, I would recommend working more with Veeam. It's easy to sell because it's a good product, but I'd be working on the price. It's easy to implement, easy to set up. You can be low a low-tech company and get someone to figure out how to do it easily enough. 

The challenge I would have would be getting Vembu to price it competitively. If they aren't willing to, just go with Veeam or tell them to do a manual backup or go with some other solution.

Vembu is a great product. It's priced too high, but it's a good product.

Backup and replication.

If we have any issues with servers having been corrupted or damaged, we are able to restore our backups. We are also able to store our backups offsite, in case of fire. Right now I'm using it with VMware. The benefit is being able to replicate the information to a different offsite building where I can store it. We're an FQHC and we have to have an offsite backup in case of a fire.

If we were to lose all of our data we wouldn't be able to operate. We run a 24-hour clinic, we have an ER department, and the data needs to be safe. If we didn't have that information stored safely, our patient information, we would not be able to run the business. So it's very valuable for us.

It also saves us time being able to do backups automatically instead of manually.

Finally, for reporting purposes, it's safer for us to have multiple places where backups are stored. We feel safe that the information is backed up more than once.

The most important feature is the Restore, to be able to restore in a disaster recovery situation.

If the English accent of the support agents was a little better, so that we, as the users, could understand it better, that would be nice. It's very hard to understand the support people when we talk to them because of the accent.

We haven't encountered any issues with the stability so far. It's been working fine.

It can handle a lot because it's doing a whole data center, so it's handling everything.

Tech support is good.

I purchased Veeam but my local reseller sold me only a minimal number of licenses and I was not told that I needed to purchase many licenses. So it was not cost-effective for us to have that solution installed here.

The initial setup was not complex at all. It was easy.

It's very hard to estimate ROI. If I have a disaster issue here, my whole company is down, so I cannot put a value on it. It's really the value of the whole company. If we don't have that data we aren't able to run. It's a very valuable tool for us.

The pricing is good. 

Veeam was one of the options we looked at.

Test it first. Make sure it works in your environment. But I will also say that it's an immediate investment that needs to be done.

We aren't using the compression or encryption features. We don't need them.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It's not a ten because the accent of the customer support agents is very difficult to understand. You have to ask a few times when speaking to them. That's the only issue, the rest of it is good. It's a good product. It's working.

We use it to back up a test lab type of environment. It's a virtual environment where we use Hyper-V.

The way it improves our organization is that we haven't worried about looking at backups in about a year or so, it's just been running on its own. It also delivers an enterprise-level of data protection and helps with our budget. I estimate we have saved $3,000 - $4,000.

The most valuable feature is the Hyper-V backup - it's just one click. I don't have to worry about it.

There's a feature that does syncing with AWS Cloud backup online. It's not that straightforward to get it set up.

We haven't encountered any issues with the stability of the product.

I haven't tested the scalability yet.

Tech support has been pretty good. I've reached out to them a couple of times and they answered my questions. The support has been pretty decent.

We previously used Veeam. Vembu is much cheaper than the competitor, than the Veeam suite. That's why we went with it.

It was very easy to set up. It took us about 30 minutes to deploy it.

I prefer the way Vembu is licensed. When you look at Veeam or any other product, they price per node. Vembu is licensed per host. You just buy a host license and it backs up unlimited VMs within that host. The others charge per VM.

We evaluated Veeam, Comet, and Windows' built-in backup.

Look at the options out there. If you're looking for a cheaper solution go with this. If you're looking for more features and integrations with other solutions, then you would have to go Veeam.

Although we use it with Hyper-V, I don't know if it enables high-availability. We currently just have the one user, the test environment backup.

I rate Vembu a nine out of ten. The one point off is because the cloud sync options are not that straightforward to set up.

The primary use for this solution is to replace the old-fashioned backup solution that we had that was based at the application level. I was doing backups of an SQL database or mailboxes from Exchange, but we needed a more modern solution where we could back up the entire virtual machine.

The solution is used for taking a backup of the virtual environment, and the benefit of this is that the speed is a lot higher. The product is taking a full backup during the weekend and takes considerably less time than our old solution. During workdays, it's doing an incremental back up every three hours, and that is also a lot faster. It also gives me a lot of options on which restore point I should use, in case I need to restore something. So these are huge benefits for the organization, speed and multiple restore points, that we didn't have in the past.

Another benefit is that the whole process is running at the ESXi level so the users do not really experience any delays or any lack of performance. We just keep them going, using the infrastructure, the VMware infrastructure. In the past, that was not the case because, during the backup process, it was slowing down the server because the server itself was executing the backup. Now, another server and another hypervisor are executing the job and the end-user does not experience anything as a result of the process. It is going on in the background. No delays at all.

In terms of data protection, we are not using disaster recovery because we are not licensed for it. But given the fact that we can afford the few hours the restore is going to take us, it is reducing costs, and the maintenance we used to have of switching tapes and external drives. All that kind of stuff that we had in the past has now been eliminated.

The most valuable features for me are that I can back up the entire virtual machine, but when restoring I can restore at the file level.

One issue that we are facing is that, during the evaluation period, we had some jobs that were replicating three virtual machines from one ESXi to another. Then, during the license purchase and activation, that Replication functionality was disabled because we are not licensed for it. As a result, we have one job left, the replication job that we were running, but since we don't have access to that area of the product we now, we are unable to delete that job. I need assistance on how to unlist that job.

Otherwise, we have no issues. It's functioning as expected and we're getting the results that we were expecting from the product.

A couple of times, the Vembu server was stuck and we couldn't access the web interface of the server and we had to restart the server. But that was during the migration progress where a lot of the equipment was updated and changing, so we cannot blame the product itself. Since the environment stabilized, we haven't faced any issues at all with the product.

We haven't encountered any issues with scalability. We gave it fewer resources than the server needs. Initially, we configured it with 16 gigs and then we cut it in half, giving it just 8 gigs, and the system is still performing and acting stably and within our needs and expectations.

Our building hosts around six companies. Currently, the product is used only for one hypervisor and one of the companies but the plan is to expand: First, the licensing for more hypervisors, and second, to expand the enterprise solution because we might need to use the Replication function that we are not using at the moment.

Their technical support is excellent. The speed at which those guys are replying is like chatting through email. They reply immediately and, in most of the cases, they have the answer available right away. It is very acceptable and we appreciate that.

We were using Symantec Veritas Backup but it was an old-fashioned solution - at least the version that we were using. It was doing backups on the level of application, taking a backup of a database or directory structure or the like. We switched to Vembu because it allows us to back up the entire virtual infrastructure and then we minimize the downtime in case of an emergency or a failure.

The initial setup was straightforward because it was an appliance. We downloaded an already-installed and already-working virtual machine which is acting as a backup server. There were minor issues to connect it to our local network and set up some iSCSI drives and volumes, etc., but it was next to nothing when compared with having to install it from scratch.

We downloaded the virtual appliance, activated it, and then configured the network interfaces. After that, we connected the server to our hypervisors and the system was up and running. The deployment took four hours.

We didn't use a third-party service provider at all. We directly contacted Vembu, and the back-office and support personnel were very helpful. Every issue was solved within hours.

In terms of money saved, it's hard to say because we need to calculate the man-hours that we spent on monitoring the old system, and the employees that had to visit the computer room and replace or change tapes, etc. So it's not that clear. But the fact that we were using an old solution for about 12 or 13 years, I expect the amount of money we will save is going to be huge.

We have only been using the product for two months in production now, so the return on investment is not easy to see in that short period. But I believe that it's not going to take more than the next six months to see a return on investment, considering the man-hours that we are saving, that we aren't spending any more monitoring an old backup system.

Pricing is fair enough.

What was not clear enough in the documentation on the website was that that you're licensing per CPU socket and you are only licensing on the restore sockets, not the backup sockets. It's a bit technical, but it was very well explained during the demonstration that we had during the evaluation period. The technician explained exactly how the licensing is working. That was information that I couldn't find on their site and it needed to be explained by their representative.

We had in mind to use another solution that was not based on Snapshots. It was based on replicating on the sub-second level of the VM virtual disks. Although it was compelling, and we considered that solution, it didn't have that direct access to information that the Vembu side was giving us.

To get a quotation on that product you needed to find a representative near you and have them do a quotation for you. It was not that direct and immediate. On the other hand, Vembu had all the pricing and documentation listed on their site, so we had all the information we needed. It was within the budget and we decided to test it. That's why we chose Vembu as our solution.

Although Vembu doesn't seem to be very fast for some environments, for example, banking, because it's based on Snapshots, which is a rather slower procedure, it has been just fine. But I would evaluate another solution that is not based on Snapshots. I can for sure recommend Vembu if high-availability is not a requirement.

We are using the compression that is embedded in the system. We downloaded the Linux virtual appliance, Linux Ubuntu, and this appliance is now part of our live organization, it's a live system. The embedded compression system is very satisfactory and we didn't have to alter anything within it. 

We didn't need to activate encryption because our infrastructure is only available within our local network, it's not available outside the firewall, and the destination drive is actually an iSCSI volume that is only accessible through the Vembu backup server. That's why we didn't need to encrypt our backups and possibly add delays to the whole procedure.

We don't use Microsoft Hyper-V, we only use VMware ESXi. The virtual environment that we're backing up through the Vembu solution is one ESXi that hosts three virtual machines. It's an end-to-end VMware solution. During the evaluation period, we also had the option to use the Replication function. We tested it and it's an option for the company to purchase, to upgrade the license to activate it, but this is going to be decided in the future.

The number of end-users using the functionality of the backup solution is around 70, but the end-users don't know it is being used. There are just two system administrators who use the Vembu console as administrators. One is full-time and the other one is part-time, so we need one-and-a-half people to run it. The maintenance is so minor. We just follow up on the emails the server sends saying that we successfully finished a job or that there was an issue. We then visit the web interface look at the reason for that failure - because the server was busy or the like. The maintenance is very easy.

I rate it at eight out of ten because, during the evaluation period, we had a server that was sizing at about 1.8 TB and the product took about 26 to 27 hours to restore it. So the slow restore is an issue. Eventually, we minimized the amount of data. Now, we are less than a terabyte, around 800 gig, so we expect the restore to take less time. But it's the slow restore that makes me give it an eight.

Backup virtual machines on VMware.

I am able to verify we have availability of our VMs in case a failure occurs.

• Quick backup and restore
• Very simple and understandable interface

I am still testing restores and it seems some problems may be related to our hardware. Because we have not implemented the correct hardware yet I cannot be sure where the problem is.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

I run into the problem of their chat service not being available frequently. I like chat as it is quick.

When it is not available I have to get a support ticket going. I was asked to provide a TeamViewer number and that was fine. However, I was waiting for a while and needed to go to lunch. If the TeamViewer session could be accessed either within 15 minutes or scheduled, so I know when they will connect, it would be helpful. It is really necessary that I be available during the session as there are questions. I do not want to be chained to my computer while I wait for the session to start.

The prior solution took hours to restore a computer. When it was done it had an error that the support staff couldn't figure out. While they were trying to figure it out, I installed a trial version of Vembu BDR with no assistance from Vembu support as it was so simple. I was able to perform a backup and restore easily. And the most important item was the restore time which took 15 minutes.

Very straightforward. It seemed to be mostly intuitive, although in some areas I had to think about the functionality. I then referred to the instructions and had no issues.

The pricing structure is in line with other solutions. However, the option to replicate offsite to a unit at another office or at home is a big cost benefit. Instead of paying monthly for cloud storage, you replicate offsite for free. If preferred, you can also replicate to Vembu offsite.

We currently use StorageCraft ShadowProtect which is a really good product. As we move forward with Vembu we will want to standardize on Vembu. It seems it is more flexible as a total solution for physical, virtual, file/image backups and offsite provision.

Download the product and give it a run through. With some products, this is a tough process as you spend a lot of time testing and they don't work correctly or have enough benefit to justify a purchase. Then, you have wasted all that time. But Vembu was quick and simple enough, it did not waste a lot of time.

We use it for backup copies of key virtual servers in our company.

Fortunately, we have not had to recover lost data. However, it is reassuring to know that we can recover lost data, if needed.

The most valuable features are ease of setup and configuration.

I have not been impressed by the data compression of the backup images. They seem to take up nearly as much space on the backup drive as they do on the server.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not faced any challenges with its ability to  scale.

Their technical support is very good to work with, as they are able to propose alternate solutions to problems that work well for us.

We did not previously use a different solution. Vembu was selected after reviewing, then trying several different products.

The initial setup was straightforward and well-documented.

We were able to take advantage of a promotional pricing campaign. 

I do not know how often Vembu offers the promotional pricing campaign, but it can be cost advantageous.

In addition to Vembu, we evaluated Veeam, Unitrends, and Virten as alternative solutions.

Verify that you can restore a virtual machine (VM) from its backup and ensure the notification of backup results (success or fail) is readily available.

It is a backup and disaster recovery solution for small businesses. I use it primarily for Vista machines.

The backup is constant so it makes things simpler for me. To put it simply, it just works.

• Snapshots
• Constant backup for SQL, application services, and Active Directory
• External disaster recovery
• Small memory footprint when running

It's also easy to use because of the graphical user interface. It's simple enough for a child to use. With Vembu Cloud I can view the status of all my clients' backups. I can configure backups from the interface. I am able to do 99 percent of what I need to do from the GUI.

I suggest that the dump of the database have the option to either be backed up to Vembu Cloud or be backed up to all backup sites and not only to default storage.

If the backup server crashes I create another backup server and use the backups and the database dumps. I have to use the default path of the backups. It would be a great option if I could just import the backup files.

In the past, I had some stability issues but I no longer have them. It was corrected in the last version. It is working without problems now.

Scalability is not a problem.

The support from Vembu is very, very good. These guys have saved my life two or three times.

I have used many solutions up until now. I switched to Vembu because of the price.

The initial setup is simple. It is not complicated. The only thing that makes it more complicated is when there are a lot of databases.

I would rate it at 9 out of 10. It's a great option for a small business looking for a cheap solution requiring two or three different backup sites. Vembu provides strong support. I am not giving it a higher score because it is complicated to recover a crashed backup server.

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.