Enterprise Features for SMB Costs
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We have leveraged Arcserve [UDP] backups for many years as our sole disaster recovery solution. We are able to offer up-to hourly backups as well as our own home-brewed direct-to-cloud capabilities back to our own data center for our clients, keeping costs incredibly low for enterprise-level features. In all the years we have used Arcserve [UDP] we have never had a failed recovery, reliability and scalability are the names of the game!
Pros
- Stability of agents
- Flexibility (able to load on low-end hardware in a pinch)
- Reliability of backed up data
Cons
- Multi-tenancy, the UDP product is very singular in its levels of deployment, while able to be connected for moving data around they remain their own individual units.
- Reporting needs help in general, but especially as it is difficult to ascertain 'most recent backup' it is mostly just success/fail data.
- Simplicity, as an enterprise product it can have a steep learning curve.
Most Important Features
- Replicate to [an] external backup server, core to our [offsite] efforts we can maintain a single backup server in our cloud which our clients can replicate to, everything fully owned by us!
- Deduplication can get extremely small and compressed. This is assisted in being able to use SSD drives and proprietary compression methods.
Return on Investment
- We have been able to keep our clients' costs low and add advanced features with no additional overhead for us in licensing.
- It does however cost us a significant amount of additional technician time to review backups each day compared to other products aimed in our vertical.
Alternatives Considered
N-able Backup (formerly Solarwinds Backup), Unitrends Data Center Backup and Recovery, ShadowProtect SPX, ConnectWise Recover (formerly Continuum) and Acronis Advanced Backup (formerly Cyber Backup Cloud)
Other Software Used
N-able Backup (formerly Solarwinds Backup), N-able N-central (formerly Solarwinds N-Central), DNSFilter
