AppAssure Replay 4: A First Look

If you’re in the market for a backup product that not only does virtual servers but also physical servers, you may want to take a look at Replay from AppAssure. The guys at work have been after me to try it out for a while, but last week I finally set it up at a customer site and was able to mess around with it a little bit.

Overall the product is pretty sound in the sense that it takes a backup when you tell it and then dedupes and compresses it. I have not tested out the bare metal restore, or the application level restore (like Exchange emails, SQL etc) but I did test a simple file restore and it was very easy to do. Unlike many backup products where you create jobs with many servers in that job, you simply add each server in as a protected machine.I will leave most of the marketing stuff to AppAssure but some of the cool features include the ability to do a bare metal restore on a virtual or physical server, and the ability to replicate between “Cores” (a core is the backup server).

While I still have to investigate further there were some things that I did not like about Appasure they include the following:

  • Only processes one server at a time
  • There is a need to install an agent on every Virtual Machine
  • May not be deduping across servers, but instead, each server is deduped only with itself?

From a reseller/VAR point of view, I do like that it can be managed remotely and that it does not rely on VMware Snapshots to do backups of a VM. One other nice feature is that you don’t have to do a backup and a replication separately, instead you can just replicate your backup data to another core… something I really wish Veeam would do. I would say that if you like Veeam for your VMware environment then you would probably like Replay for any physical servers you still have.

Anyhow stay tuned as I plan to dig into this product a little further, even though it would not be my first choice for protecting a VMware environment, but because it does show some potential especially for physical servers.

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2 Responses to "AppAssure Replay 4: A First Look"

  1. We used to use Replay where I work, but have stopped using it. In our experience as they released new versions the product became slower, unstable, and unreliable.

    They were misleading about SQL backups. Out Exchange backups became unreliable. The GUI was often slow and unresponsive. There is a severe lack of logging and alerting. The alerts that are in the software do not give enough information to be useful.

    We were happy with pre-4.x versions of it. We have since gone back to backing up Exchange with Backup Exec. We never backed our VMs up with Replay and I would not recommend doing it when there are far better solutions for VMs. We are currently using Veeam for VMs.

  2. Hi Matt,
    Thanks for reading! And I agree with you on several of the points you made. I did notice taht if i left the GUI open for a long time (over night) it would become very slow. I also agree that There are better solutions for backing up VM’s … Veeam is still my product of choice for that area 🙂

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