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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
