BDRSuite Backup & Replication 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 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.

It has provided us with a value-added service for our customers, aiding us in becoming a one stop shop for all IT and Communication requirements.

The intuitive GUI, ease of use for doing any type of backup.

The Support for Exchange 2016 mailboxes, a daily report for all customers on their last backup (Current report misses some information)

The Backup solution has been very stable and any issues have been promptly addressed by the Vembu support team.

Customer Service:

Customer service is always excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is always excellent.

We switched to another solution only because vembu were discontinuing the product, glad to hear they continued it and we came back on board.

It was extremely simple to setup and we were working in no time at all.

We advise them to check out other solutions but we are very competitive. We license by server/application and storage allocation.

In-house.

It is between 15–30%

We advise them to check out other solutions, but we are very competitive. We license by server/application and storage allocation.

On the client side of it, the ease of installing the software and getting it up and running: Each version they bring up, it gets better and better.

• The support side of it
• The usability, the ease of it: It is user friendly. We've tried other software before and it wasn't that great on the user front, but this software seems pretty straightforward.

While it's hard to say, the support side of it is sometimes a bit hit or miss; the tech support. Generally, I would say about 70% of the time, they're pretty good. They're pretty accurate on what we want, and the odd times, I think it’s lost in translation.
We've had a few bugs with the software and, for some reason, we've always had to get their support to dial in to fix it. It's not something that we can fix ourselves, really.

Generally, we have not encountered any stability issues.

So far, scalability seems OK. We've only grown, not masses, with this software, so it's hard to say, really.

Technical support is 7/10, on average. They could make it better by improving the speed of responses. Sometimes, they'll dial us back in a few minutes; sometimes, it takes them half a day before they have a look at it.

We previously used a different solution. The ease of user feel is really the reason we switched over to it.

The initial setup is going back quite a while back. I think it was in the middle: it wasn't too straightforward; it wasn't that tricky. It was average.

It's pretty straightforward to use once the software gets going.

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.

We use it for backing up VMs.

We are using it with VMware and the benefit is that we have reliable backups.

It's pretty basic backup stuff. I set it up and it just runs.

The compression, encryption, and deduplication features all work fine.

The system died twice and it was apparently the result of corrupted disk sectors. I tried to work with tech support to fix it, but they essentially gave up. So twice, I had to rebuild our server. I don't know why that happened and tech support didn't seem particularly concerned about figuring it out. That's my only complaint.

We've been using Vembu BDR Suite for about a year.

It did completely die twice and couldn't be revived. If that happens again, we're probably going to look at another product. My only concern is the stability.

We're not likely to be adding too many more VMs anytime soon. So I don't have any way of judging the scalability. We might deploy it on another site. We'll see about that.

Technical support is good but the problem I have is that I often can't understand the technicians because they have extremely heavy accents, and that makes communication kind of difficult.

We were using VDP, which is a free application from ESX. But it's not very good, in fact it's awful, and it's no longer supported. We replaced it with Vembu and we're quite happy.

The initial setup is simple. It didn't take more than a day or so, including testing. I got a trial version and decided it did what we want it to do and then I just set it up.

The solution provides us with enterprise-level data protection.

The pricing is quite reasonable.

If you can't afford Veeam, which is very expensive, I would recommend Vembu.

Vembu is used by me and another system administrator. That's it. We manage it, but it only requires one person for deployment and maintenance. 

Our end-users don't know it's there.

It gave us an easy to use and stable backup service to offer our customers for a low price.

Central management and easy control of allowed space per client makes end user and client management easy.

The service is built on MCALs, so implement a policy in which someone keeps refilling these. But overall, MCAL is a nice way to be dealing with licenses.

We ran into some problems in which the server hosting the backup service needed to be restarted once a week. We contacted support and they resolved the issue within a week!

We didn’t have any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

We did have a previous solution, but it was almost 10 years ago. We were not happy. The provider and the software didn’t work as we hoped. We called it “one-time-backup” internally.

The setup was straightforward and support was always available if needed.

The cost is low and has always been. We haven’t found any cheaper solution for our demands. By using the MCAL, we feel safe and secure. It is kind of “straightforward” to add new licenses for the backups.

We did evaluate other solutions.

Use the support. They are knowledgeable and will resolve any issues you may have. They will contact you directly so that you have a person to talk to. You can tell that Vembu focuses on customer support.

Another plus is the ease of use for the users. In our environment, we sell it as a service and our customers install the backup-client themselves.

When migrating systems or doing a reinstall, Vembu has a really easy-to-use system to re-implement the backup jobs and rules. Short spoken: The end user experience is great and easy to use!

Our backups are done on a nightly basis. We don’t run out of space on the backup drives; no tapes/hard drives have to be stored or swapped out.

The online backup feature allows me to store my backups off-site without having to physically drive them somewhere.

There have been times when the backup hangs and does not complete possibly due to a connection issue. Stopping and starting the service usually works to restart it. It would be good if there was a way for it to automatically restart.

There have been times when stopping and starting the service did not work and I had to call support. This has not happened recently, though.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is good. They are always willing to help and will see the problem through, right up to its resolution.

Initially, we did onsite backups to tapes and then to hard drives. We switched because we wanted an off-site solution.

The initial setup wasn’t too bad. Once we got everything working, it has been running okay.

It is easy to add products. The pricing is reasonable.

You should definitely consider using this tool, as an off-site backup option.