Unitrends Appliance Family v. Barracuda

Disclaimer: Sentral IT, based in the United Kingdom, has been a proud Unitrends Reseller for over 6-years.

In part one of this competitive analysis series, we covered Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ Versus Veeam.

In part two, we explore the differences between Unitrends Appliance Family Versus Barracuda.

versus

Primary Advantages of Barracuda:

• Barracuda appliances, similar to Unitrends’ offering, delivers on-premise and off-premise appliances to offer a comprehensive data protection solution. The all-in-one appliance eliminates the need to stitch together a solution comprising of different storage, software, and backup vendors.

Primary Disadvantages of Barracuda:

• Integrated fixed/rotational archiving to disk, tapes, NAS, or SAN is not supported by Barracuda Backup Servers. Customers cannot leverage their investment in tape/autoloader/NAS/SAN infrastructure for long-term retention and disaster recovery.
• Barracuda Networks data protection product suite is a small portion of their primary product offering of network security and firewall solutions.
• Barracuda Backup Servers do not offer bare metal restore options to dissimilar hardware, thereby reducing the efficacy of the solutions.
• Barracuda offers native agents only for a limited set of operating systems and relies on protocols like CIFS/SSHFS for backup and restore of unstructured data, which may not capture the file system specific metadata like access control and ownership rights.
• Barracuda Backup Servers do not encrypt data at rest on the on-premise appliance, so it may not meet regulatory requirements for many customers.
• Barracuda Backup Servers are powered by integrating acquired technologies from BitLeap and Yosemite Technologies. This increases the complexity of the product, which hampers user experience.
• Barracuda Backup Servers do not  offer Windows Instant Recovery
• Barracuda Backup Servers do not have a single user interface to access data and requires access to multiple connections and technologies
• Barracuda Backup Servers do not  have the option to “seed” the data to off-premise appliance. Initial data sync will take weeks depending on the amount of data being synchronized.
• Barracuda Backup Servers do not have cloud service data centers SAS 70 certified
• Barracuda Backup Servers do not have features like Failover Virtualization for Windows is not offered by Barracuda Backup Service.
• Support costs are almost double to Unitrends Premium level

Product and Licensing
	Barracuda	Unitrends	More Detail
Non-restrictive licensing	Yes	Yes	Standard licensing does not include restrictions on features, platforms supported, or per-client fees.
Integrated appliance	Yes	Yes	Support handles a vertically integrated data protection appliance – not just software.
Available as physical appliance	Yes	Yes	Available as an integrated server, storage, networking, operating system, backup software, archiving software, replication software, etc. as a physical appliance.
Available as virtual appliance	No	Yes	Available as an integrated operating system, backup software, archiving software, replication software, and so on as a virtual appliance.
Available as software only	No	No

Support
	Barracuda	Unitrends	More Detail
Supports hardware and software	Yes	Yes	Support handles a vertically integrated data protection appliance – not just software.
Proactive hardware monitoring	Yes	Yes	Standard support includes proactive hardware monitoring.
Remote diagnostics	Yes	Yes	Remote diagnostics are available from support.
Self-installable	Yes	Yes	The product may be installed by a customer.
On-site support	Yes	Yes	On-site support is available.
Phone support	Yes	Yes	Telephone support is available.
E-mail support	Yes	Yes	E-mail support is available.
Online interactive chat support	Yes	Yes	Online interactive chat support is available.
Online support form	Yes	Yes	An online support form (or portal) is available.
Knowledgebase	Yes	Yes	A knowledgebase is available.
User forums	Yes	Yes	Support monitored and managed user forums are available.
Video tutorials	No	Yes	Video tutorials offered by the backup vendor.

Monitoring and Management
	Barracuda	Unitrends	More Detail
Appliance-based monitoring/management	Yes	Yes	Monitoring and management of data protection software, operating system, storage, server, and other solution components.
Single pane of glass	Yes	Yes	Monitoring and management of multiple appliances from a single user interface.
Web-based management	Yes	Yes	Monitoring and management can be performed via the web.
SNMP/SMTP/alert-based notifications	Limited	Yes	Notifications are available via SNMP traps, SMTP e-mail, and alerts. Barracuda Backup Servers do not support SNMP traps for notifications.

 

Recovery and Restore
	Barracuda	Unitrends	More Detail
Instant recovery for Windows	No	Yes	Recovery from a failed Windows server in less than 5 minutes.
Instant recovery for VMware	Yes	Yes	Recovery from a failed VMware server in less than 5 minutes.
Dissimilar bare metal restore	Limited	Yes	This includes P2P, P2V, V2P, and V2V.
Heterogeneous bare metal restore	No	Yes	This includes not only Windows but VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and other operating systems. Barracuda Backup Servers only support bare metal restores for a few Windows environments; Unitrends has integrated bare metal restore support for multiple operating systems in the physical and virtual environment.
Heterogeneous backup	Limited	Yes	Barracuda natively supports only the Windows environment and leverages the SSHFS/CIFS protocols to backup other operating systems like Linux, Novell and Mac. Unitrends supports over 100 operating systems, applications, and hypervisors using agent and agentless methodologies as needed.

Backup
	Barracuda	Unitrends	More Detail
Virtual and physical backup	Limited	Yes	Supports virtual and physical environments; Barracuda supports a few physical environments in addition to the Hyper-V and VMware environment. Unitrends supports over 100 operating systems, applications, and hypervisors using agent and agentless methodologies as needed.
Heterogeneous backup	Limited	Yes	Barracuda natively supports only the Windows environment and leverages the SSHFS/CIFS protocols to backup other operating systems like Linux, Novell, and Mac. Unitrends supports over 100 operating systems, applications and hypervisors using agent and agentless methodologies as needed.
Heterogeneous storage protection	No	Yes	Support for protecting NAS and SAN volumes.
Integrated fixed/rotational archiving	No	Yes	Integrated disk-to-disk-to-disk, -tape, -SAN, and -NAS for both long-term retention and disaster recovery; Barracuda Backup Servers do not support fixed/rotational archiving; Unitrends offer integrated fixed/rotational archiving to disk, tape, SAN, and NAS devices.
Continuous incrementals supported	Yes	Yes	Continuous-based incremental backup is available (includes near-CDP snapshot).
VMware CBT (Change Block Tracking)	Yes	Yes	Support for VMware CBT is available. Unitrends supports full/differential and incremental backups leveraging CBT technology.
Hyper-V CBT (Change Block Tracking)	No	Yes	Support for Hyper-V CBT (which Microsoft does not support) is available.
Application-level backups	Yes	Yes	Application-level backup is available; Barracuda has support for protecting applications. Unitrends, in addition to providing a native agent for Exchange Server and SQL Server, also offers integration with the native application tools (e.g., mysql).
Differential backups supported	Yes	Yes	Differential backup is available.
Maximum concurrent backups	Unlimited	Unlimited	The number of concurrent backups.

Technology
	Barracuda	Unitrends	More Detail
Supports agents	Yes	Yes	Supports client-level, agent-based protection where necessary.
Supports agentless	Yes	Yes	Supports agentless-based protection where necessary; Unitrends supports agentless-based protection for VMware, NAS storage, and iSeries (AS400) environments.
Deduplication	Yes	Yes	Supports deduplication; Barracuda offers target-based block deduplication, whereas Unitrends supports target-based byte-level (content-aware) deduplication.
Retention control policies	Yes	Yes	Supports minimum and maximum retention setting.
Encryption	Limited	Yes	At least AES-256 level encryption. Barracuda encrypts data in-flight to the off-premise appliance and at rest on the off-premise appliance, but it does not provide encryption for data at-rest on the on-premise appliance. Unitrends offers encryption at rest and in-flight between the on- and off-premise appliances.
Failover virtualization	No	Yes	Supports Windows and VMware instant recovery.
Grid-based scalability	Yes	Yes	Backup servers (or appliances) are configured in a grid for interoperability, monitoring, and management
Integrated symmetric and asymmetric replication	Yes	Yes	Barracuda and Unitrends both offer private and public cloud protection for disaster recovery.
Hub-spoke replication	Yes	Yes	Barracuda and Unitrends both offer replication to off-site locations on a single-tenant basis.
Integrated peer-to-peer replication	No	Yes	Cross replication between appliances.
Integrated private cloud replication	Yes	Yes	Barracuda appliances as well as Unitrends appliances can be deployed in a multi-tenant private cloud setup.
Integrated public cloud replication	Yes	Yes	Barracuda Backup Cloud services as well as Unitrends Vault2Cloud offer multi-tenant public cloud solution.

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For more information and Unitrends pricing, please contact Sentral’s sales team on 08456 448016 or email us at sales@sentralsystems.com.