Arcserve UDP 7200 Quick, simple and fast backup appliance
Pros
- Simple setup. It was really quick and simple to get the device connected and set up with Windows server built in the initial connection was very familiar. The setup wizard for the backup software was easy to walk through.
- Fast backups. Of the three solutions we demo'd the Arcserve appliance was by far the fastest to produce a complete backup. And the incrementals from then on are also very fast - it causes almost no network disruption as the backups are complete[d] so quickly.
- Fast, simple restores. Having restored a SQL database with it one time, a business critical one, I can attest to the ease of restoring. It was simple to find the point to restore from, and to push it to the server that it needed to be on.
- Great granularity on notifications. Being able to set up the number of notifications to indicate errors or problems is very helpful. It rarely has any issues (mostly it's my network that's the problem!), but when it does it lets you know.
Cons
- 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.
Return on Investment
- 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.
Alternatives Considered
Barracuda Backup and Unitrends Recovery Series Backup Appliance