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.
Likelihood to Recommend
If I were speaking to a fellow Managed Service Provider, I would likely NOT recommend this product. There are simply too many other tools out there that are better hitting this particular market. And the pain points that we do have with them are especially difficult because of our business model. However in speaking to pretty much anyone else in IT/Disaster Recovery this is an enterprise tool built to handle anything you throw at it. UNC paths and linking backup servers to one another, the flexibility of the tool allows for maximum cost savings if you build it right.
