Arcserve backup appliances are presented by the vendor as combining enterprise-ready software and industrial-grade hardware united, to create turnkey backup appliances for disaster recovery (DR) and application availability – now with Sophos Intercept X Advanced for defense against malware, exploits, and ransomware.
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DemandTools
Score 9.8 out of 10
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DemandTools for AppExchange is a data quality toolset for Salesforce.com CRM centric customers.
The product comprises 11 individual modules to control, standardize, verify, deduplicate, import and manipulate Salesforce and/or Force.com data.
We use Cisco and Commvault at our main site for backup and security, but we needed a solution for a remote site with none of those options available. We have put it as an all in one solution and it has worked out perfectly. If a colleague in a similar situation needed a solution like us, I would highly recommend this.
DemandTools is perfect for any system that constantly adds new records to its database. For example, in higher education, we are constantly purchasing search names from various vendors and DemandTools allows us to make sure we are not doubling up on the same records. It saves us money in the long run as we are not mailing out multiple copies of our brochures to the same person.
Scalability. Main issue is each appliance has a finite space for backups, and can't be increased on the box itself without replacing it with another appliance completely.
Onboard interface. Doesn't have an interface that's accessible via the web natively. While that's great for security, it is a little awkward if you need to access it from offsite.
I wish I could make changes to my existing scenarios using save rather than having to create a whole new scenario. Maybe you can, I just haven't been able to.
Some features aren't user intuitive and it takes a while to learn.
It's a great product. The only thing that holds us back is it was frustrating working with their sales team. We also don't like that when Validity purchased DemandTools they immediately started charging us quite a bit while it had been free for non-profit users when CRMFusion owned it. They also don't let you buy it for just 1 or 2 seats, you have to pay, I believe, in batches of 100 seats.
It's very easy to use. Plug it in, run through the wizard and you're pretty much set. Hardly ever have to go back in and check on it. Everything can be scheduled fairly granularly. The console is simple and laid out well. While doing a restore takes a number of steps, it is not hard to follow what you're doing. A few things couple be displayed better, but the built in help options do explain things well enough.
[I] have only used it a couple of times, but they've always been responsive and solved the issues I've had. Time to get to a person was fairly low, under 10 minutes each time.
Support can be slow so do not expect quick turn for urgent issues. Help for specific queries not not there. Product tech support is offered. It would be great if query support, even if paid, was offered The training webinars help with the basics but not much if you need advanced functionality.
The trainings are free live webinars that give you a solid base for getting started with the program. The only weakness is they don't have any advanced classes.
I had just started using Salesforce about 3 months before I did the implementation myself, and it was easy to do just following their step-by-step instructions.
Barracuda had the best console of the three we evaluated. Cloud hosted it was the easiest to access. However, it took forever to do the initial seeding backup, and then the nightly backups ran over into the next day. It was just so slow to do the backups - we never even tried a restore. The resulting backups also seemed to take up a significant amount of the appliances space, it was almost 3/4 full from the get go. Unitrends did not have natively a granular email restore option, it had a third-party option, but that was not something we were interested in. It also took a long time to run the backups. Arcserve was the fastest by far, [as] it did not fill up as much (way better deduplication) and it had a built-in granular email restore. While I wish it had a cloud console, overall it had the most important features we were looking for.
Though RingLead has much more to offer in terms of automation (and it is in Salesforce rather than a separate program), DemandTools still has our heart. DemandTools is very cost-friendly and we were able to increase the value of DemandTools by programming in additional saved scenarios. I decreased admin time in the DemandTools suite by approximately 25% after implementing saved scenarios for every reoccurring update or list upload.
Restored a SQL database for our CRM system very quickly. Without which, we would have been floundering and unable to contact our donors, and as a charity this would essentially have cut off much of our revenue. So it pretty much paid for itself in this one incident!
Reduced downtime restoring files when users delete them. We had tapes before and they take so long to do a restore from. The local disk based appliance made restoring a quick and simple task.
