Vembu BDR Suite is a universal backup solution catering to the backup, recovery, and disaster recovery needs of diverse IT environments. It is also optimized for service providers who deliver BaaS and DRaaS to their customers.
$12
per year per endpoint
Hornetsecurity VM Backup
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
Hornetsecurity VM Backup (formerly Altaro) is a backup and replication solution for Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines. VM Backup can manage large infrastructures, with the revamped backup repository providing long-term storage and more efficient use of disk space.
We tried to use Altaro first of all but found it to be very big, take up a lot of resources and found the features we needed hard to use. When we compared Vembu we just found everything was so much easier and as it was also free this ticked nearly all of our boxes and the …
I used to recommend Aconis, but it gets super-expensive when you get to the server and hypervisor level stuff, and I'm finding myself to not like the latest user interface and options. I also used BackupAssist, which is actually a great product for Windows Servers, but Vembu …
I have used almost all Vembu products—BDR, VMbackup, Network Backup, Image Backup, and OffsiteDR. I haven't used the 360 for easy management of all the BDR servers but I'll probably eventually use it as I build out my VembuBDR servers.
If you are looking for an enterprise capable backup suite that quickly does the job without hassles then you will quickly look past the freebee software like Microsoft NT Backup or the overly complex of the like such as Acronis.
The reason for choosing Vembu was that the free version's limits were very reasonable, the installation could be performed on a Linux based operating system, and management could be done using a web UI.
Although not available to select, I've used the VMWare vDP product. Vembu stacks up really well, feature for feature, and even comes out cheaper. That's why I went with it.
Value for money. Veeam is a good backup solution but it's very complicated and expensive. On other the hand, Altaro was not so reliable as it crashed the storage many times. It lacks a few important features.
I tested Vembu against Veeam and for the price, Vembu was the better option. I also had a great support experience as I had to contact Vembu twice after mistakes I made. While using Veeam the software was not as intuitive and support responses were not as swift and accurate.
The primary alternative to Vembu would be Veeam. This would be my second choice in a close race. If I remember correctly, Veeam only supported virtualized environments until just after my decision to go with Vembu. We had also previously tried Microsoft System Center Data …
Each of the products got its own strengths. For me, it is all about the customer, and about their requirements. Altaro is very good software, and I can get protected what I need to for our customers, and that is the most important part.
The only other competitor I am personally familiar with is Carbonite. I use that for file-level backups throughout my network and it works well but while it does offer backups for virtual machines, I have never found it to be a reliable option. Jobs failed for me regularly for …
When we have looked for a VM backup solution we've tried some other competitors, even to backup just data and not all VM. We've tested Acronis backup that is a complete solution but more expensive and more complicated, we've also tried Nakivo but didn't convince us the …
We backup all VMs with both Altaro and Arcserve. Altaro is very powerful when it's time to back up and restore, but gets corrupted too often. Arcserve assures that we always have a safe copy of the VMs, but the backup and restore process is very slow. Can take days to restore a …
Veeam seems like another excellent backup solution, and appears to have many similar features to Altaro VM Backup but also seemed more complicated to set up when I tried 5+ years ago.
Also, at the time, Veeam's licensing was very confusing where you needed to count CPU's on the …
Altaro brings value to organizations looking at other platforms. It's definitely less expensive overall than Veeam, Datto or Infrascale. The recovery solution for Altaro is very good and reliable. Any organization looking at Veeam should consider Altaro as a potential …
First of all Web UI makes it so much easier to manage, with few clicks you can schedule a backup, you can see the progress and you can instantly recover it. There is a multiple environment support which is great for hybrid environments. Pricing is more reasonable than other high priced backup solutions
Altaro VM Backup is great if you have 1 or 2 VMs that aren't backed up by any other means. I initially had some issues with setting it up so it backed up to a NAS, and sometimes the host wouldn't sync to the client. There probably wouldn't be an issue if the host system is the backup location. The interface and configuration were pretty intuitive and gave you a lot of information on the status of your backups.
Bare metal system images. These are incredibly flexible, enabling you to do dissimilar hardware restores, local or online backups and restore to VHD
Full, differential and transaction log backups for SQL server, ensuring rapid backup and restore, with maximum storage efficiency.
Incremental backups for files, meaning only the changes which have been made to a file are backed up, dramatically reducing time to backup and increasing storage efficiency.
Fast and simple setup. I didn't need to read through ANY documentation to set up and have a backup running.
Easy and cost-effective licensing. I didn't need to count CPU's or VM's or other random facts to work out my licensing. Just how many hosts, and then one of 3 feature levels of which two have unlimited VM licensing. Hosts x Feature Set = Cost.
Easy Restores. Backing up is one thing, but restoring and having confidence in the restore is another. It just works, simple and effective.
Help is easy to find if you need it. From within the app, it gives you options of email, phone, and live chat, which is usually available even with odd time zones in play.
User interface on the servers do not have enough tools to better monitor the systems and finding information is difficult.
User interface at portal is difficult to navigate and confusing
Support documentation is too generic and rarely answers my questions.
Licensing and acquisition. As a reseller and partner the licensing model is confusing and the portal interface to manage licensing should be scrapped and rebuilt. It is difficult to navigate and the available information is too vague.
Recently, communication with new channel contact. My previous contact was articulate and answered my questions.
Did I mention licensing? This is the most confusing and difficult process I've dealt with in 25 years. Makes Microsoft look simple.
More cloud-based storage options. Currently, only Azure is supported, which is excellent, but it would be good to have AWS and Google storage options too.
It would be AWESOME if they could do a restore from Azure cloud direct to an Azure VM instance. Currently, you need to set up an Azure VM machine with nested Hyper-V, install Altaro on that, and then restore into a nested VM, this gets crazy expensive.
Better notification of errors, or more around having a threshold, so if it misses one backup of a constant backup that happens every 5 minutes but recovers at the 10 minutes back, it is ok. Just think it needs to identify significant or long-running issues better than the occasional little issues.
I think the product will remain useful for us and as the company keeps improving features it will continue to be relevant and useful. We don't like switching technology much and BDR solutions shouldn't be something that a company replaces every few years., that's why most likely we will keep using it.
As outlined in are parts of this review, I have various issues with the way their KB center is structured and how error codes aren't documented or KBs for a specific error provide steps for older versions of the software and aren't applicable to the current version because of a design layout change. "Go here and select Y" where the "here" has been removed and doesn't exist anymore. Or they release a new version without any supporting documentation even though they restructured a lot of the interface and updated the error messages.
A lot of people in the technical industry deliver what I would call snack crackle pop topics, where the software gets over complicated, and they drown people in all the "fancy" features. Altaro, from my point of view" has designed the software to be super usable, easy to implement, as well as support. It is really one of the best designs
It often takes a very long time to get an issue fixed. the support folks seem committed to getting it fixed but they often seem to be trying different things and hoping something works. I did not get the sense that they had a clear idea what was wrong.
One of the most important benefits of the Altaro HyperV backup solution is the support. From the free edition, you're able to chat with the support that can assist you in a remote session an find a quick solution that solves the issue. It is always available. The email support is also.
Overall the implementation was not complicated. The linux version installation is rather easy step by step process. It's just when you do something for the first time, it always take a bit longer because it's new and you just need to be more focused to configure everything properly
I tested Vembu against Veeam and for the price, Vembu was the better option. I also had a great support experience as I had to contact Vembu twice after mistakes I made. While using Veeam the software was not as intuitive and support responses were not as swift and accurate.
The only other competitor I am personally familiar with is Carbonite. I use that for file-level backups throughout my network and it works well but while it does offer backups for virtual machines, I have never found it to be a reliable option. Jobs failed for me regularly for no apparent reason. In the handful of times I have needed support, they were helpful and straight-forward.
Backups complete quickly each night saving me time from always having to modify client backups to fit within their backup windows.
Money: We are saving hundreds of dollars per year for us and our clients by switching to this product.
I no longer spend significant time managing backups, checking their status, etc. Alerts are consistent and warn me if there's a problem. It just works. I rarely have to touch it other than when I do random restore tests (as I do with any backup product) and the instant recovery feature works well for that.
Restoring our primary ERP VM has already saved many hours of rebuilding from data backups, so that in itself already gave us an excellent ROI for having Altaro running.
The quick and easy setup also makes sense for a fast ROI as we didn't need to spend much time or effort in its set up.
Lastly, any other restores we have done for retrieving files or testing backups were so simple and easy to do that the process didn't take long and saved us time and cost.
