BUDRs Revisited

After working with the Datto and Zenith backup and disaster recovery (BUDR) appliances for a while it's time for an update. I've covered 5 categories: Reliability, Service, Integration, Pricing/value, Ease of Use. I've scored each device in each category and summed the scores out of a total of 50 points, 10 for each category.

Here's how it played out:


------------------------------ Zenith ------------------------------
Reliability - the boxes themselves seem to work fine, but periodically I get errors in the backups that require me to restart either the Zenith or the target box. I'm not sure if it's Zenith's software or Shadowprotect. It doesn't happen all that often and the monitoring and ticketing system notifies me well when it does.


Service - For being a e-mail/instant messaging only service, Zenith does a good job. I still wish I had a person to talk to on the phone though.

Integration - I use Autotask and Level Platforms and the Zenith just doesn't integrate all that well with them... I assume since they do their own monitoring. I understand that now I can have the Zenith system push tickets in to my Autotask but I haven't done it yet. I'm not sure I can do any monitoring of the Zenith box with my Level Platforms. I'd like to in order to keep everything managed by my NOC. That's a task for another day.


Pricing/value - While the Zenith has a considerably higher up front cost I'm not getting as much hardware for the buck. Zenith beefed up their servers in the last iteration but Datto still beats them in most all the models. You just need more RAM for virtualization... especially for things like SBS 2008.


Ease of use - the Zenith has a more robust interface, but it's clunky and has too many options buried in submenus. The remote access on the other hand is better for the Zenith since it uses Logmein IT Reach.


------------------------------ Datto ------------------------------
Reliability - The machine itself is at least as reliable as the Zenith. No problems with the hardware. The box is smaller and looks more like an appliance, so I thought maybe it would have cheaper hardware, but apparently not. They've been solid.


Service - The phone support has been spectacular. This is why I'm not looking back at Zenith. I call, get a person on the first try, and they speak English as a first language. Don't get me wrong, some of the support guys overseas are great, but you never know how much of an accent they'll have and sometimes that's a bar to communicating technically. As another item, it's a really nice but small thing to have them send out the offsite hard drive. They even notify you that you need to do it and it's easy to request. They manage the whole process better.


Integration - I don't think the Datto is much better than the Zenith, frankly. In addition, it's a Linux box rather than Windows, so I imagine it'll integrate less well with monitoring services. On the other hand, I've had less problems with the backups on the Dattos, so maybe it's not a big deal. I need to look further in to having the Dattos monitored and fully managed by my NOC.


Pricing/value - When I considered the two products pricing I took in to account several variables: initial cost, monthly cost for support, monthly cost for offsite storage. Because the Datto charges in 1 TB increments for offsite storage I compared the Zenith with similar amounts of storage offsite (the Zenith charges a base plus per GB over last I checked). It comes down to this... the Zenith has a much higher up front cost than the Datto. The Datto has a somewhat higher monthly cost. When I projected the cost of both out 3 years using 2 TB & 3 TB the Datto was hands down cheaper by over 20% for the term. Having more monthly charges for Storagecraft might change this slightly, but not enough to sway me... especially with the service and support bonus for Datto.


Ease of use - Ordering off their website is easy although I've had a couple problems with their website now and then. Maybe they were just doing upgrades to their web hosting hardware? It's easy to buy the Shadowprotect licenses and assign them to clients. Their phone tech support is stellar... have I mentioned that yet? The only problem I have is with the remote management capability of the box. There's a silly drop down box on the support website where you have to choose what you want to do and click submit. You then wait a while for an e-mail link that gives you the remote capability you requested (VNC, web access, etc.). It seems like this could use some work. It's just not nearly as nice as the LogmeIn IT Reach service.


------------------------------ Scoring ------------------------------
Scoring Zenith & Datto out of 10 in each category:

Category	Zenith	Datto
Reliability	8	9
Service	6	10
Integration	7	7
Pricing/value	6	8
Ease of use	7	6
Overall	34/50	40/50

------------------------------ Conclusion ------------------------------
While I don't have any real problems with the Zenith product and they're both pretty slick offerings, I'm going with the Datto for two reasons - price and service. If you are on the Zenith monitoring platform that's probably enough to push you to the Zenith, but otherwise I recommend the Datto.