BDRSuite Backup & Replication Reviews

We are a managed service provider (MSP). We have also started to sell it recently. We have been using this solution at our company, and after testing the product for close to six months, we realized this is a good option moving forward.

We are a managed service provider. For us, this solution is even more beneficial because we can control the licenses, renewals, and other things for customers from a managed service provider's panel, and we get an option to upsell and cross-sell to clients.

Its ease of use and price are most valuable. It is simple and straightforward. Someone who has never used any backup software will easily understand it from the first installation. It is that simple. Price-wise, it is much cheaper than its counterparts. 

It also has very less overhead on IT in terms of the product, service, and outcomes. Another good feature is that you don't really have to install any agent on the server side, especially when you are taking Hyper-V backup. We are using Microsoft Hyper-V, and we are taking backup. No agent and other things need to be installed on your machines.

I have done a couple of restores on a trial basis to check the integrity, and I did not find any issue in terms of the reliability of the restores. It was smooth.

It would be a great improvement if they can give a console to control the systems. All other vendors let you simply log in to the cloud console and control everything from there, but for Vembu, whether you choose Vembu Cloud Backup or Vembu Disaster Recovery, you still need to install the Vembu software on your on-premise system and configure it from there. It would be great if I can get a cloud console to manage the systems. 

They can also give an option where if you don't want to install an agent, you can use your own server and manage it, but if you want to manage it from the cloud console, you install the agent. It should be my choice. I should have control when I am sitting at home. I should also have control over the cloud so that I can monitor everything and do whatever I like. If my organization policy does not allow me to do that, then obviously I don't do it, but Vembu should provide such an option.

I have been using this solution for close to six months.

It looks good to me. So far, I haven't found any glitches. It is always there, so it is stable. You run it through the browser, which makes it simple.

It is scalable. We started with a 30-days trial, and after that, we started using its free version. Today, we upgraded from the free version to the enterprise version. We are also working on putting 10 TB backup on Vembu cloud as well as going ahead with almost eight servers for the disaster recovery offsite. 

To upgrade from the free version to the enterprise version, I simply had to synchronize the license, and everything was set. You can scale it very easily. You just need to activate the license under your account, and then you can log in to the Vembu console and just synchronize the license, and you're done. If you want to go from an on-premise backup to the cloud, you should have a cloud license. You can then synchronize and configure it. That's it. 

In terms of the size of the environment, one of the implementations is done for a government organization, and there are around 20 or 25 users with close to 5 terabytes of data and two virtual machines. We don't have plans to increase its usage in the same organization because this is a small subsidiary of a big government office. With the same client, there is nothing more we can do. They have a limited number of users, but we are working on implementing it for other clients.

I have used their support, and I had a very good experience. We were basically installing a demo for another client, and they were using 2008. We were getting a particular error while doing the installation, and for that, they needed to reboot the server, but you just cannot reboot the server in a live environment. You need to fix up a time for that. For example, if we have to reboot your servers, we need to schedule it with you, and you will schedule a time for it with your management.

Vembu's support is available 24/7. They said that whenever we are ready, we should just send them an email, and they will do a remote session with us, which is what precisely happened. When we were ready, I sent them the intimation that we will be ready in about 15 or 20 minutes, and their support guy connected with it and helped us.

Its ease of use and less price set it apart from other solutions. I have used many solutions, such as Acronis, Veeam, Symantec, Veritas, etc, and all of them are a bit complicated. I found Vembu to be the simplest one. In terms of features, it is similar to others. It has encryption and retention features and multiple backup options that every backup software provides.

Currently, we are also using Acronis, and slowly, we will be migrating from Acronis to Vembu. It is cheaper in price than Acronis. Of course, Acronis gives other benefits such as patch updates, cybersecurity, ransomware protection, and so on, but people have their firewall, endpoint protection, and antivirus. They don't really need to invest again in something that they don't need. The only thing that they particularly need is a backup solution that is encrypted, so there is no point in protecting them from all these things because they are already protected. If you go for Acronis Cyber Cloud, a client is not going to stop using the firewalls or endpoint protection. There is no point in loading double onto that. It is a good addition for those people who are very specific and know what they want. If you just don't know what to do, then you can go on a shopping spree.

With Acronis, all you have to do is to install the agent, and then you can control everything from the cloud. Wherever you are, you simply log in to the console, and you have your servers over there, and you can do whatever you feel like. With Vembu, you have to install the Vembu BDR software onto the server, and from there, you can basically dump the DR or a backup onto the cloud.

It was very straightforward. You simply install the software, plug in the storage or wherever you want to dump that, and create a profile. That's it. These were the three steps, and of course, the fourth one was to activate the free software. You can start with the full-fledged version after 30 days. You can convert the trial version into the free version, which is available online. It is easy. 

Its initial installation took less than an hour. This includes downloading and setting it up.

Price-wise, it is much cheaper than its counterparts. I like its pricing, and its price is okay. The lesser they take, the more profit we can make, but we are happy with its price.

It is very affordable. We were working with a client, and they were looking for backup software and had a very tight budget. When I told them that Vembu is only going to cost around $400 to $500, they were shocked. They didn't believe me, so I showed them the website so that they can check the price themselves. Of course, if they agree to that price, we get a 15% rebate as a managed service provider.

You choose the type of license you want. There are two types of licenses. One is a subscription license, and the other one is a perpetual license. If you go for a perpetual license, next year, if you want, you can renew the support. It is up to our clients whether they want to renew the support or not. They have an option. They also have an option to go for a subscription.

Every IT scenario differs from others. It is a good product, and just give it a shot. If it fits your organization, you will save a lot.

I have been in IT for over 25 years, and I had never heard about this software. I came across this through a consultant who was also working for a government organization. They asked us to install the free Vembu backup software, and I wondered which is this solution. I checked their website, downloaded the software, and installed it for the first time. I was amazed why there is no marketing for this. I get so many marketing emails and other things, but I never got any email related to Vembu. I also didn't come across it while doing research on the internet.

We have been using this solution for only six months. There are many features that we haven't used, but whatever has been phased out and tested was okay. We haven't yet used Vembu to back up Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or AWS, and we also haven't used Vembu's Download VM to help in migrating physical machines to a VM environment. Similarly, we haven't used its Instant Boot VM feature for instant access to VMs or physical machines after a crash. 

It provides multiple options to recover data during hardware failures or accidental deletion of files, but I haven't tested this option. Having such a feature is a good addition because if some resources are not there, you can restore your data to different ones. We will definitely be using Vembu's data integrity check feature after the enterprise installation.

I would rate Vembu BDR Suite an eight out of 10.

We use BDRSuite for our databases and server backups.

BDRSuite helps us manage our virtual machine backups and restorations.

The most beneficial features for data protection are the BDRSuite for Windows servers and the BDRSuite for MySQL.

BDRSuite allows us to instantly recover data automatically by clicking on the restore button.

It is useful that BDRSuite provides multiple restore options for recovering data in a granular manner because we don't always need all the data.

The incremental backup processing provided by BDRSuite is important for recovering particular data points.

The backup and replication scheduling options are good.

Adding and removing backup jobs using BDRSuite is remarkably simple. The intuitive interface makes it a one-time setup, eliminating the need for frequent management.

BDRSuite has brought significant improvements to our organization by providing invaluable peace of mind regarding our data backups.

BDRSuite's comprehensiveness is helpful, especially for our Google Drive integration.

BDRSuite enables us to unify all of our data sources into one solution.

Eliminating multiple backup solutions has saved us a lot of time allowing us to focus on optimizing our servers.

We create backup repositories in Google Cloud automatically using BDRSuite.

BDRSuite has saved us 30 percent of our time.

The best part of BDRSuite is how user-friendly it is and how it does not require any maintenance after the initial setup. BDRSuite runs automatically over time.

The initial setup process can be more simplistic and quicker.

I have been using BDRSuite for a month and a half.

I would rate the stability of BDRSuite nine out of ten.

BDRSuite is scalable.

The technical support is responsive. I would like them to provide the details of our scheduled calls at least 15 minutes ahead of each call to give us time for pre-planning.

Positive

Previously, we performed manual backups using a tool manager and implemented automated backups using Google Drive Sync. However, this solution proved ineffective, prompting us to switch to BDRSuite.

The initial setup took eight to ten hours and after one week we had to call to set up some backups on our drive space.

One person was required for the deployment and it was straightforward to integrate with our existing infrastructure.

BDRSuite is competitively priced.

Businesses on a tight budget can still utilize BDRSuite.

I would rate BDRSuite a nine out of ten.

We have BDRSuite deployed in multiple locations in the US, UK, and Germany. Our server team is the only group that uses BDRSuite.

I recommend trying BDRSuite for a month. Organizations will likely find it to be cost-effective, and the support is good.

I use it to back up the virtual machines running on VMware ESXi. I also use it for backing up Windows Server. I don't use it for Microsoft 365. I have a daily backup, and I also have a monthly backup to capture all the data and changes.

I started with version 3.0, and now, it's version 5.3.

The backup window is very reasonable. Recovery is also easier. We have scheduled incremental and full backups, and it helps a lot with our infrastructure. I feel comfortable running this in the virtual environment.

We can instantly recover data. This instant recovery is very important because there are some files we need to recover immediately. We can easily recover a single file or folder. That's a very helpful feature.

It provides multiple restore options for recovering data in a granular manner. We have daily and monthly backups, and sometimes, we need to go back, not just to yesterday. We have multiple restore points, and we can just select one from the menu. It's a very easy and very important feature.

We are running the daily incremental backups. They've reduced the backup window. These incremental backups are very important because we cannot do the full backup during the weekdays.

When it comes to backup scheduling, similar to all backup solutions, it provides scheduling options. We just can't do backups manually. We have pre-configured it with the daily incremental and monthly backups.

It isn't hard to add and remove backup jobs using BDRSuite. You select a machine or a hard disk, and then you can go to the next step and schedule the backup. That's it. I don't need to open the interface every day. I schedule the backup, and I just receive the notification message in my mailbox. That's it. As long as I see a successful message, I'm fine. I just let it run.

Provisioning disks for restoration is easy. You can just select a disk, and you just recover. They'll provision the disk for you.

The most useful feature is that you can back up the virtual machines in different ways. You can back up from a vhost, and you can also back up from a Windows server. It doesn't matter what type of infrastructure or hypervisor is there. It's very flexible, which is its most useful feature for us.

The response time of the support could be improved a little bit. Sometimes, I need to wait for two or three hours to get support. With VMware, we can get urgent support in an hour.  Other than that, I'm pretty good with BDRSuite.

It has been more than three years.

It's very stable. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

I don't have too much experience with scalability because our infrastructure didn't change too much. 

I'd like to get quicker technical support for urgent issues. Sometimes, it took longer than I expected. For example, I expect support in one hour, but they may get in touch with me within two or three hours. That has happened twice last year, but it doesn't always happen. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We were previously using Veeam Backup. Their features are a little bit different, but they both are doing the same thing. 

We switched because my manager wanted to try this option. The Veeam Backup costs more than Vembu. They also don't support some editions of ESXi, whereas Vembu BDRSuite supports all the versions and all the editions.

It was straightforward. It was set up a long time ago. There was no big change after that. We just upgraded to the latest version.

I implemented it along with the support person. I searched on the web to select the vendor.

It doesn't require much maintenance from our side. There are just patch updates, and they don't happen during the backup window. They do not affect production. It's good.

I'm not sure. It might have been in less than a year. It's cost-effective. It didn't cost too much. We are completely satisfied with the cost.

It's very affordable. We are very satisfied with the cost. It's very affordable for us.

We didn't evaluate any other solution.

I'd advise running the trial of on-premise and online versions to see what's the difference. In the initial setup, you may need to adjust some services or the local backup storage called the repository. Test it first and make sure it's working. There are so many backup tools in the market. You can't just read the white paper to do the selection.

Overall, I'd rate BDRSuite a nine out of ten.

We use BDRSuite for backups of our primary and secondary servers, our virtual machines hosted on Hyper-V, as well as tape backups. 

BDRSuite takes the hassle out of backups by automating the start time, eliminating the need for late-night office visits to manually initiate the process.

BDRSuite enables near-instantaneous data recovery, with even our largest multi-terabyte restoration only taking five to ten minutes. That is quick for a backup. The quick recovery is extremely important to us. We want to have as little downtime as possible.

Granular restore options in BDRSuite are crucial. They allow us to recover individual files without restoring the entire system. This means we can retrieve a lost file without wiping out any progress made since it was lost, saving significant time and effort.

The incremental backups are great! By only backing up changed data, they reduce stress on our servers and drives, which in turn extends the lifespan of our machines.

The backup and scheduling options are great in BDRSuite. I can choose individual times a day down to a minute essentially. Usually, what we do is we set all of our backups to start at midnight so there's nobody in the office, and there's no work that can be interrupted by the backup in the worst-case scenario.

It is extremely easy to add and remove backup jobs using BDRSuite. We select the backup that we're trying to remove, and we just delete it from there. We have to make sure whatever storage it was using is cleared off our machine.

Backing up our virtual machines is crucial, especially since some store medical records. To ensure continued operation and data protection, BDRSuite provides us with a backup solution for our business needs.

Thanks to the breadth of backup coverage provided by Vembu, we have been able to stop relying on multiple backup solutions for different data sources. We were using Windows Backup in a couple of the WD external drives and now we only use Vembu across all of our data sources.

It was extremely easy to integrate BDRSuite with our existing infrastructure.

The smooth implementation is the most valuable aspect of BDRSuite.

Vembu's website doesn't clearly state that their software is designed for tape libraries, not standalone drives. This led to significant difficulty connecting our standalone drive, even requiring a rollback from Vembu to function properly. I'd like to see easier connectivity to tape drives and better stand-alone tape drive management.

I have been using BDRSuite for one year.

I would rate the stability of BDRSuite nine out of ten. Short of the machine shutting off, the software will not go down.

BDRSuite seems like it could handle growth well scalability-wise aside from the occasional reboot issue. However, since we haven't tested it with multiple servers, it's difficult to say for sure. Because of this uncertainty, I'd rate its scalability a five out of ten.

Working with technical support was challenging due to the time zone difference as they are located overseas, but outside of that, they are great to work with.

Neutral

While the initial deployment of BDRSuite itself was simple, it ultimately took three attempts due to connection issues with our tape drive during the first two tries. This extended the deployment process to three or four days.

I was guided through the implementation fairly well by a BDRSuite agent who helped me get it installed.

While BDRSuite's overall return on investment hasn't been substantial, its granular backup feature has proven very beneficial. This functionality saves us significant time by allowing us to directly restore individual files instead of having to restore entire image backups and then manually search for the specific file needed.

BDRSuite, although cost-efficient, is more expensive than most other providers.

While I would recommend BDRSuite for businesses with tight budgets, it's ultimately a case-by-case decision based on specific data storage needs. Not all businesses require comprehensive backups for virtual machines and other complex systems; some may only need a simple image backup solution.

I would rate BDRSuite seven out of ten.

Our company currently uses BDRSuite on a single server for my supervisor and me. It doesn't handle individual machine backups since we have a well-established group policy suite that automates machine setup, making it standardized and efficient. This streamlined process allows us to quickly restore backups whenever a new computer is added or an existing one fails.

BDRSuite may occasionally require attention after a server reboot, which can happen due to hardware upgrades or other unforeseen circumstances. I've observed instances where the task manager details section shows abandoned PostgreSQL connections, requiring us to manually close them and restart BDRSuite for it to function properly again.

BDRSuite is a good option for medium and large businesses. While full VM backups might not be necessary for all businesses, especially smaller ones, having a disaster recovery plan is crucial. However, skip standalone tape drives and opt for a complete tape system to ensure better compatibility with BDRSuite.

We use it for providing backups and recovery. We have a file server with a little over seven terabytes of data. The content changes quite a bit and we needed an easy tool to work with that would give us the ability to restore in a variety of ways: at the individual file level, folder level, and whole volume level, if necessary. This tool does that for us.

We're in telecom and wireless. We do installations and maintenance of towers and equipment for microwave and cellular. We do that mostly in the United States, occasionally in other places in the world. We'll have 400 people out in the field providing data to us that we have to put in a repository, that's the file server, that shows work prior to us initiating our work assignment from our customer, during the process, and at completion. That way, the customer doesn't have to go to remote places to verify. Sometimes, we can address an intermittent problem and say it's fixed and, of course, it comes back the next day because it really wasn't fixed. So, it's hard for our customer to know when something is done.

So we take a lot of images of our work, associated with projects, and those are uploaded by the field people every day. We provide the backup necessary to our customer. We'll receive ten or 20 gigabytes of images daily, which go into the repository. They have to be tracked and recorded, put into the reports associated with the projects and the status of those projects, and then provided to our customers.

That's what we do on a daily basis. We're a 24/7 shop, so what we do has to minimize downtime, so that the tools are available to the people, especially if they're in the field. They'll VPN in and provide reports and images necessary to show the work has been performed.

The nice thing about Vembu is that when it's running - as it does incrementals daily - we don't see a negative hit on the performance of the server it runs on. I can also pause it, should that happen, but I've never had to do that. 

It generates daily reports. I look at them seven days a week, even though I only work five days a week, because I want to make sure that everything's working fine. From a productivity standpoint, it has not hindered anyone and it keeps me very well informed that our backups are being completed. It gives me the data that I need to know, that makes me feel comfortable: Yes, that makes sense for that day, that much data being added to our repository, etc.

It has made my job, making sure we have a backup and being able to count on using it, a lot easier. As far as impacting the user community that uses the file server that's being addressed for backup purposes, it has not impacted them in any negative way whatsoever.

Finally, it helps us deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce budgets at a price that - and we don't want to encourage them to change their pricing - is a great value.

The dashboard is very easy to use, setting up the backup is very intuitive. Since that's our primary purpose in using it, it made it easy, when I was doing evaluations a year ago, to choose the product.

If I want to back up to this past Friday, and reinstall the file server to that state, I can choose a point in time and issue the command to back up and I don't need to go in and restore the last full backup and then apply iteratively, sequentially, all the incrementals, as I've had to do in some other software in the past. It's nice that I can pick a point in time and tell it I want to go to that state and it's transparent to me. It happens in the background for me.

It's very easy to use, very quick and efficient. From a backup standpoint, it has provided us the tools we need on a daily basis to know that it's working properly and with almost no manual maintenance work from us to verify it. It just comes to us. It's been very positive, helping us address that need efficiently.

In the beginning, when we had some hiccups, I would chalk that up more to a learning curve for the product. Once we understood how it operated - where we thought it was doing something a certain way and it was not - it was easy to understand, once it was pointed out.

The times when we've had problems, they've not been repeated problems, they've been addressed, and it was more learning curve issues. With any software there is a learning curve. Not all backup software operates exactly the same way, so some things were a little bit different. But once we understood why and how they worked, it made sense. It was sometimes a different approach, but not a problem for us.

There is no problem with the product's stability. We get our nightly reports on schedule. We've never had the application fail, and better, the application doesn't interfere with anyone else's application. It's been everything and more than what we had hoped for.

I can only speak for our environment where we've used it - and I know it has so much more capabilities, because when we go in through the dashboard and the wizard to create backups, we see where we could use it and how we could use it. But in our environment, whether we had seven-and-a-half terabytes or 15, I wouldn't have to change anything.

The other thing that I like is that it has software to provide a distributed copy to another site. It's a very economical add-on to the suite. But because it's terabytes, and with it going across the Internet to do the initial cloning of that, it has a feature where you bring in your other servers, set it up, establish your initial clone there, and you put the server out and then you only have to keep track of the changes, which is much easier to do. We have a 100-megabit connection to the internet, but even there, if you're going to have to keep terabytes worth of data synced, it would be really hard. In this case, we only have to keep track of the delta once the initial distributed backup has been made.

It has a lot of capabilities. We just started getting into the distributed backup and, from a scalability perspective, I've not seen any issues in our use of it. And especially in the beginning, we monitored the resource usage to make sure that we didn't see a degradation on the server to the user. That was not a problem.

I could easily see us doubling what we're backing up without any issues and problems and with no additional tuning necessary.

The other thing that stands out, while it isn't a feature per se, is support. Any time we have a question, whether we call or email them, we get an amazing response. We're not a Fortune 500 company, we're smaller, we don't have a large number of licenses yet. But we get quick response and follow-up to make sure that the issue has been properly addressed, as though we were a Fortune 500 company. I'm amazed by the level of support they provide.

Last time I contacted them was because the volume that we put our backups on became full, and I wasn't sure what the best way was to address the problem. They gave me directions on how to address the problem, but more importantly, on how to avoid the problem in the future.

Around October of 2018, I did escalate an issue regarding backups but that was the only time that I can remember having to do so. Like everything else, it went extremely well. The follow-up and the level of detail, hands-on, were great. I've been in IT for 40 years and it's not something I'm used to seeing. It has been a nice surprise.

The oldest previous solution we had was Windows Server Backup.

Once we put Vembu on the production server, we ran a full backup that evening. That's probably one of the nicest things about the backup. Not that companies don't have seven-plus terabytes of data to backup - that's large, but there are certainly many that have much more than that - but backing up that much data in Windows Backup is an impossible task. So the ability to address the data in the way that Vembu does, versus the way Windows Backup does, we had to use a Vembu-type product. There was no choice. Seven-and-a-half terabytes in Windows Backup, on a server level, would've taken weeks, which is not acceptable.

We needed a solution that was doable. Some of the solutions that we were using took an unreasonable amount of time to back up the data. Even when they were running on the same server and the pool was on the same server that they were backing up to, it was not acceptable. We needed something that was more efficient in the way it addressed reading the file structure. Vembu provided that. Then we had the additional functionalities that we wanted to be able to restore the way I mentioned, plus the support. I can't say enough about the support Vembu. I just don't have any other positive experiences that are as nice as what they provide.

Nothing was complex regarding the initial setup. We could do backups on day one with the software. It wasn't a question of just doing the backups but of trying to do them so it provided us the greatest amount of flexibility and that we were using our pool space as efficiently as we could. That took a little bit of investigating and communication with support. But once we understood it, it was not a problem.

On the initial install, there were some things that I thought were going to happen a little differently. We thought we wouldn't eat up the size of our pool, our repository, for backups as quickly because of compression. But when you think about it, that's not a Vembu issue. That's just a practical result of the fact that jpegs already come compressed, so you're not going to get much compression. We underestimated the amount of space we needed.

Installing it takes just a couple of hours. It's easy to do. There was no negative impact on anything else running on it. It was simple. We did a backup the same day we installed it, in a test environment, so we could do whatever we wanted. We could do restores, do incrementals, combine incrementals to weeklies, etc. And we didn't have any problem doing any of those things. We'd have a question, periodically, but we would get a response the same day, which was always nice.

In terms of staff for deployment, I'll divide that into two pieces. One was a more thorough test of our environment, versus not the high-level tests that we did during the evaluations. We did that over a two-week period of time with a quarter to a half of a person.

Regarding the implementation strategy we developed, there was an assessment of what our needs were, tailored to our specific situation. Once we did that, we evaluated what products we might be able to use. We then considered support and maintenance issues and would the products be able to function within our requirements, timeframes, and give us the backup capabilities at the levels that we wanted: file, folder, and volume. This process allowed us to come up with a shortlist of three products and do a little bit deeper testing with them and decide on which one we thought was the best. 

We haven't done an analysis of how much money we have saved by switching to Vembu. We did a post-implementation assessment that made sure all of our requirements were met. Part of that is financial, but I can divulge the savings that it provided.

I've worked for extremely large companies as well as startup companies. In our environment - out of this office we have 400 field people - we're a relatively small business. If I was backing up multiple file servers, much more data than we are, it wouldn't take much more time with Vembu. There's an inherent amount of time to install and get to know a product, and then to use it. If it's pretty intuitive with good support, it can be really easy. Vembu has turned out to be really easy. The amount of budget associated with supporting is way under what we expected. That's a good thing and that's because of the support that they provide, instead of us having to do things like we have to do with some of our other applications.

For example, we've used our accounting system for a long time here, and people are used to it; creatures of habit, like most. But the amount of support that it takes, despite it being here for decades, means that any time we make a change it's way more involved. There's an element of risk that we don't care for. It's not what we like. There's an unpredictability about it. We have not seen that with the Vembu product.

It's an amazing value. Their licensing structure is easy to understand and it's very fair. We don't have any problem with it.

We looked at different tools and tested them ourselves. We had our own requirements list of what we needed to do, and it was all tailored to our environment. The evaluation occurred over a month of elapsed time and probably involved a person to person-and-a-half in that period of time.

Quite honestly, we could have gone with other products, but the support level from Vembu was unparalleled. Today, a lot of companies want to refer you to a forum, a community, and they don't want to talk. They don't want to provide people who know the product and know your situation. It's hard to find an example in a forum that is exactly like what you're trying to address. Vembu, consistently over the month, as well as the second-level evaluation, was always there to provide support and answer questions. It was a deciding factor, absolutely. They had the functionality, but they provided the real people for support, which just made a world of difference for us.

Some of the companies that we were using and evaluating, when we told them what we ended up choosing, just out of courtesy, in some cases they either didn't know who they were or acted like they didn't know who they were. 

It was an easy decision, when it came to the end, to choose Vembu.

It has to meet your needs. But for most people, for backups of large amounts of data, I would strongly encourage you to use it, and not be hesitant to contact the support desk if you have a question. Don't just install it with the intent that your first use is going to be your final setup because there are ways to tune it to make it more efficient on space usage for the pool where you put your backups. The help is there. That's the good thing. With most other products, you're not going to get the same response. Use the help and you're probably going to be quite happy with it.

I would encourage you to count on support, run your tests, play with it, and you'll be pleasantly surprised and happy with the results.

Of the software that I license, I feel I get more value from this than any others. I just can't think of anything that I'm looking for that Vembu BDR isn't already addressing. I've got no wish list for them.

Everything I need is being addressed by the product and then some. I wish them great success and I want them to be around a long time. I don't want to have to go and replace this. This is a good product. It does what we need and I'm not seeing anything that I wish it had.

I like the compression, encryption, and deduplication features, although in our case, we don't get much compression because a lot of our material is already compressed. There just isn't an opportunity to see a big reduction. But the tools allow us to have every feature we want, including being able to restore from the backups. Of course, we don't have to do full backups very often, because of the way it has been set up.

Encryption today is, obviously, given privacy issues and confidentiality, very important. In our particular case, it's an added plus but it wasn't a real high criterion because the data that we have is not considered highly confidential. In fact, if it was put out in the public domain, it would not cause our customer or ourselves a problem. It's nice to have, but it wasn't something that was as critical to us as it might be to a lot of others.

We don't use it to back up our virtual environments. We keep things very discreet here. We don't run a VM type of environment. Servers are by function. Hardware has become so incredibly cheap. I understand the savings, the value with VM and having a virtual environment for different things. But to us, hardware is just incredibly inexpensive. If we have something in our accounting system that needs to be addressed, an upgrade or the like, we like having it on its own server and discreet from everything else. It also inherently provides easier access control for those systems that are more critical, in terms of the type of information on them.

Regarding staff for maintenance of the solution, we're talking fractions. We just look at our reports daily just to make sure that they are giving us the information we need, indicating that backups were successful and that the expected amount of data that was backed up. We know how much data comes in every day approximately. We can confirm that it's been done properly. It's just minutes a day. I don't think it needs a full day per month of attention. The maintenance is extremely low.

We have other environments that we need to address in a different way than we are today. The company is old enough that, like most entities, it is a creature of habit. So changing the way we do things is a little slow sometimes. But I can see us using this in several other environments, other than what we initially targeted. I can't tell you when that will happen but I believe that it will happen because of the experience we've had.

The end-users don't use it, per se, because they have no touch with it. It's IT that uses it. Nobody has a problem with it. We have a small group of six IT people in this main building. We try to get different people exposed to it. They vary from application support, mostly in the accounting area, and then, because we do a lot of VPN, we have network people who handle network security. We have failover network with multiple ISPs so networking becomes a big issue, plus the security side. Percentage-wise, there are more people involved in network and security than in many companies. Yet those people are still required to be able to support the applications we have, including Vembu. Nobody's had a problem doing that.

I'd love to try it in a virtual environment. We just don't do that here. We're a Windows Server shop, so I've not tried it in other operating systems, like Unix and Linux.

For my needs, I'd give Vembu a nine out of ten, and that's only because I'm hesitant to say anything is perfect.

Everything could be improved. For example, if you were to have a custom backup solution created, it might be a ten if they achieved everything you listed regarding what you need. But it's not practical to do that for an individual or a small company. I've been responsible for a lot of development people and developing applications. It's somewhat subjective on where you place buttons and how efficient they are.

Once you get used to a product, if it wasn't made for you, and it's working and meeting all your needs, without having negative side effects, you got to give it a high score. It's the only fair thing to do. The only way for me to get to a ten is to say that it's perfect, that it laid out all its buttons and features just as I would. If I had written it, maybe that would be the case, but by the time I had written it and gotten it done, I'd be retired. 

It's a great product. Amazing support. It's a very good value for our environment, no question. We will not change. This is a good product that does everything we want and more.

We use Vembu to back up and replicate virtual machines. We run virtual machines using VMware ESXi, and we back up and replicate our virtual machines.

The best thing about it is that it has been adaptable to our business model. We are in industrial networking, and they were adaptable to give us offline installers and offline licenses. That has been the biggest thing. They also allow us to order the licenses on a perpetual basis.

Backup and replications are most valuable. It seems that these servers are better because we can do application-aware backups on them. 

Windows 10 does not have application-aware backups. From my point of view, that's what's existing needs improvement. 

Something that I would like to see them do is an on-premise immutable solution.

It's probably getting close to about a year mark.

There are some bugs but not major ones.

From my point of view, it can handle as many VMs as I'm going to see. We have pretty small sites. We range from 3 virtual machines to probably 20, and I feel confident that it could handle as many as we needed.

There are five or six users who are currently using this solution. They are members of the network team here at my company. They are network engineers or network admins.

We have plans to increase its usage. Currently, we have a lot of existing sites that are using a different solution, and their licenses are still good. In the future I see us expanding more. As long as Vembu keeps the same business model, I do see us using the product more.

For the most part, they're responsive. There has never been a time when we opened a ticket and didn't hear from them for days. They're usually pretty quick to respond. We provide them with what they need, and they normally give us an answer whether we like the answer or not. Overall, they're responsive, and they at least give us an answer. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We previously used Veeam, and we made the switch due to the change in their licensing. They don't do perpetual licensing anymore. They're going to a subscription-based model, which doesn't fit with our business model.

It was straightforward. The setup is pretty intuitive. We don't need to follow a whole bunch of technical documentation in order to set it up at a site and set up the jobs. The user interface is friendly, and even for offline licenses, they provided a simple document on how to do that. That's straightforward as well. 

Its setup probably took 10 to 20 minutes.

We did it on our own.

So far, we haven't had any actual disaster situations where we've had to use the restore, but overall, we have got a return on investment. It's doing so far what we want it to do.

Its price is fair, and they still allow perpetual licensing, which is extremely important for us. They also have offline licensing.

I am not aware of any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. In terms of the affordability of the solution for businesses with a tight budget, you aren't going to beat it.

I didn't have any initial expectations of the solution based on its pricing. I found Vembu by just searching for solutions, and I didn't really have an expectation, but it can be said that Vembu has been better than my initial expectation. Its price is definitely fair.

I tested at least five or six different ones. We're in industrial networking, which is very different from a corporate IT network. First and foremost, the thing that I liked about Vembu was the licensing model, and the second thing was its simplicity. All we do is backup and replications, and they have a product that focuses on that without having this big ugly interface with multiple options that we don't even use.

I haven't fully tested all the other bells and whistles on it, but for backup and replications, it's simple, and it does the job. It does exactly what we want it to.

I haven't had to test restores a whole lot, but initially, I tested it, and the restores were fine. They were what I would expect. They were not crazy fast but also not slow. It has not increased or decreased the speed of restores from our previous software. It's about the same.

I'm glad Vembu exists because, for bigger companies like Veeam, it's good that there is competition. That way they can't fully control this market. Vembu is a solution that is more friendly to actual businesses and small businesses.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use it primarily for backups and restoration of data, for disaster recovery purposes. We back up our file servers as well as our access control servers. We use it for standard, physical Windows 2016 servers, at this stage.

The key things we use in this solution thus far are only the backup portion, the recovery, and the reports. We will try to make use of it more extensively, but for now it's working for us.

It's on-prem at this stage, but we would love at a later stage to go to the cloud.

• The dashboard is very nice. 
• The solution is very user-friendly. 

When you're looking at your dashboard, you can see all your active jobs. You can see exactly if they're successful or failed and you can actually drill down and see what caused the problem. The fact you can see that right away is nice. 

It's a very simple layout, but effective. What you see is what you get. Some dashboards have these funny graphs and a lot of information. But what I want to know is, number-one, what jobs are running? What type of jobs are running? And I want to know what the job status is. If it's a red "X" I know I have to investigate. If it's a green checkmark then I know I don't have to stress about it, it has actually backed up what I've selected. It's simple. That's what you want.

What I would love to see on the dashboard are graphs, per backup  job. I want to see the month and the days in it. It doesn't matter what type of graph, but it must just give you more information. Currently it's in text format and you have to click on it and investigate. It would be nice if I could see information in a small chart as well. If a job has failed, when did it actually fail and what percentage of it failed? Did it fail completely, 75 percent or 100 percent or did it only fail partially?

Then we would know we have to look at settings, or maybe there's a permission issue, or maybe the unit was offline. Currently it's just showing a red "X" and you have to go in to have a look. If it gave you some information such as "100 percent complete, successful," and not just a checkmark, and if it failed it would tell you, "75 percent successful," then you would know more.

We've only been using the product for three months, and only on three servers.

It's very stable, unless you have somebody messing around. Otherwise, it should not have any issues.

It's scalable. It's similar to industry standard backup and disaster recovery solutions, like Veeam. 

We want to move to the cloud at a later stage, and we also want to do backups of Office 365. We're in the process of moving from webmail to Office 365. Once we're there, we're going to use the same platform to make backups of critical user data and mailboxes.

Although Office 365 has retention and backup solutions in place, we prefer to use Vembu in addition, on top of that, for our high-level users, to be 100 percent sure. Microsoft can maybe give you 30 or 60 days of retention, but if you have your own backups, you can go back to one year, based on the typical needs of users.

Once we have our Office 365 portion up and running and maybe one or two email users, I would love to perform a backup online. The challenge we have is that our upload is a bit slow. We might need to use a satellite link, but within the next month or two we should have a solution and the internet should not be a problem. Then we can most probably run some of these backups from the cloud version. The idea is to ultimately move to the cloud.

Currently, the information we back up is for about 60 to 80 active users, across all the employees in the company.

The salespeople I've dealt with are fantastic; they are great people. They wanted the solution to work and they only stopped phoning me the moment I told them, "Listen, I'm alright. I'm okay now." They wanted to make sure that the application was working and meeting our needs. That was very nice.

And obviously, you can contact them anytime and they will help you. Their technical support is great. It's top-notch. The turnaround time is quick. The last time I contacted the person I have always dealt with, within a couple of hours he contacted me. It's not like it's 24 hours or 48 hours, it's less than that. It is good.

It's a very nice, easy, and economical solution. I'm coming from a Veeam background, but Veeam is a bit expensive. That's why we opted for Vembu. I tested out the Vembu trial version and found that it has a lovely interface, it's easy to work with, and it's something I can teach quickly. With Veeam, you must attend courses to understand it; you can't just show somebody. If I'm on leave, or I'm leaving the company, I can give anybody in my position a quick rundown.

The company I'm supporting now is not a corporate company or a listed company. The company I used to work for was a listed company and they were forced by the auditors to use a certain type of backup solution but it was expensive. When I started with this smaller company, they didn't have any backups. If something happened they would lose all their information. I was browsing the web looking for an economical but effective solution to meet the needs of this organization. I was surprised, as I had never heard about Vembu. But I checked them out and that's where the journey started with Vembu.

It's cost-effective for us.

The initial setup is straightforward. And what was nice was that I had somebody on the line to talk me through it, just to make sure. You're allowed to play around with it to get more familiar with it. Coming from a Veeam background I tried not to compare it with that. I had to work with it to make 100 percent sure that I appreciated Vembu.

I figured out most of the things by myself because it's straightforward. It's very easy if you have some form of IT or backup background. It should not be a challenge or an issue. Maybe if you're brand new to computers it could be a challenge but if you have some experience with running backups it's easy to work with.

The deployment was done within two days because we don't have a big setup. It was just me involved in the setup, from our side, and for maintenance I have an IT assistant. If I'm not there, he can handle it as well.

My experience working with the Vembu person during the setup was good. They are very proud of the product. They want it to work.

It's still too early for us to see ROI. 

But the annual cost is so low that it's going to be difficult to calculate a return on investment. But if we are going to do backups of Office 365 and those types of things, the business might see ROI, because then you're working with a lot of user information as well, and they can see the reports.

It's more affordable than Veeam, so smaller companies can afford to have a solution like this in place, which is very nice.

For three licenses we pay not even 3,000 Rand per annum, which is a bargain with what you're getting. It's not expensive if you compare it with the counterpart.

I didn't evaluate any other options other than testing Veeam for a month. I know that product and it's fantastic, but when it came to going from trial version to live version, it was a bit expensive. I went for Vembu because I could pay a third of the price and get the same service.

When I look at a product like this there are a couple of basic things it must do: 

• I must be able to access it easily, deploy it easily
• It must be secure. 
• If I want to make changes, updates must be easy as well. 
• It must be integratable, compatible with different operating systems. 

Vembu ticked all the boxes.

Do you know when a business starts to appreciate a backup solution? When it loses information and needs to recover it. If your senior management is not very risk-minded or they tend to see these things as a waste of money, the moment they lose information and you can restore it within no time, they start to respect the product and they are more than willing, when you go to them for upgrades or improvements, to actually pay for them because they know you're adding value to the business. It's not just an expense.

For a small company like ours, I would rate Vembu at eight out of 10, because while the dashboard is very nice, there are some things that the major backup solutions provide as a stock-standard, like the graphing information. Most backup solutions offer it standard. I also give it eight out of 10 because I want them to improve, but it would be nice to move closer to 10. It may take them a while to get there, but with Vembu I can sleep. I don't have to worry and that's good.

We use it for backup and replication. 

We use it to maintain critical data and save it. It suits our needs, is versatile, and the functionality is there.

• It is easy to use.
• It is simple to deploy and maintain.

Vembu is presented more like a multi-platform tool, where you have paper features, VMware, and Hyper-V. I would like to have a different set of products instead of having a single software which does everything. This could be beneficial. 

Nowadays, I don't know of a lot of people who are using tapes anymore. If you are using tapes, you don't do backup to the cloud, for instance. Therefore, maybe have a legacy version, then a cloud plus application version.

It is not a well-known software. People do not know about Vembu.

This is not a high-end product.

There were only two issues, which were minor, and the support was very fast. This is probably the top reason why we chose Vembu. They have a very good support team who are responsive. I like the way they handle their clients compared to big vendors on the market, like Veritas, formerly Symantec.

The two issues were fixed in a relatively short time. One was fixed within the same day, and the other one was fixed within  a couple days. These are the only two issues that we had for the whole year.

We haven't had a chance to experience scalability.

I would give tech support a score of nine out of ten, which is almost perfect for me.

We were relying on Microsoft Backups, which are just basic backups. We were trying to find something simple to use and easy to deploy, and that is why did proof of concept with three different products. The short list came down to Vembu. 

Currently, we are using mass technology, so we store from mass seamlessly. Then, we use the replication feature from VMware to remote that. So, we do double backup. Local backup and remote backup plus replication, which is very accessory resilient.

The initial setup was pretty simple. The backup solution was running within two to three hours. We were maybe missing some technical help during the installation, but there were a couple of technicians who helped me during the setup and finalizing it. 

Overall, the setup is straightforward. When you choose the VM options, it is even faster.

We consolidated our infrastructure. We went from about 40 to 15 servers.

The licencing and pricing are good; it's a no-brainer. It is affordable. It has value with respect to the features included in the software.

There is a drawback in the whole approach about how the licenses are managed. There are two consoles: cloud and on-premise. It seems that on a daily basis we have to manage both consoles, which isn't user-friendly. Ideally, it should be either a single on-premise console or only a cloud console. A single platform approach is the better solution. For now, with full licensing, you have to manage your instances on the Vembu Portal, then reassign licenses, and go back to your on-premise management console to do the real management. It is a bit awkward.

I do remember that the pricing was based on a VMware or Hyper-V license, whereas on our end, it should be regarded as a VM-based license. I don't know why they make a difference at the Vembu level. We are currently on VMware migrating to Hyper-V, and we didn't want to buy licenses for VMware, but still have to buy them for Hyper-V. This the only thing which does not seem fully adequate. 

We previously used Microsoft Backup, which is not reliable.

I have a lot of experience with Symantec Backup solutions, now Veritas. Compared to Veritas, Vembu is more corporate-oriented and the support is better on Vembu's side rather than Veritas.

We also tested Naviko, Veeam, and Unitrends.

Go ahead and use it.