I really want to like my Unitrends backup appliance (823). It was pretty painful getting it setup (some of that through no fault of their own.) However, after going through the pre-sales questionnaire to right-size the appliance, all of the setup and tweaking of the vss writers, changing from image based backups of our VMs to agent based (not what I wanted) and countless other tweaks with their support engineers, I'm left with retention times less than half of what I specified. and this is without any annual growth (I've only had it for a few months). Untirends wants me to double my yearly backup costs by purchasing the maintenance on a second unit or purchasing the additional maintenance on a larger model. They've also offered to GIVE me a SCSI adapter so I can utilize my legacy tape auto-loader to archive to, but I'd have to invest pretty heavily in tape and ... it's tape, again. They are at least trying to work with me, but I can't get to a happy place with what they are offering.
I'm now beginning to regret recommending them to other IT directors in my dealer community. Don't get me wrong, the backup itself now works very well. Had they gotten the size right and I could have made the decision up front with accurate information, I could be happy. It would have been my option to go with them or keep looking. As it sits, I've been promised more than what was delivered- be warned, it's very much like a bait and switch. All that said, are there any recommendations of alternatives to Uni. that you'd recommend. Something with similar features (I like the Uni feature set and backup solution in general)? I've done some looking at Datto, but it looks like there are some pretty unhappy customers on that side too.
Any help is appreciated.