Nakivo Backup & Replication switch & save promo, also free NFR licenses

Some of you may recall my VM Backup & Replication for $1/socket post from a year and a half ago, I hope that at least some of you bought in at that time and are now reaping the benefits.

Nakivo has come a long way since then and is now in release version 3.7 with constant feature improvements happening. See the results of the 3.8 beta tester survey here: http://www.nakivo.com/3_8_beta_results.htm Version 4 is on the horizon and will offer multi-tenancy and self-service recovery.

If you are a vExpert, VCI, VCP, or VMUG member you can grab your free 2-socket NFR license here: http://www.nakivo.com/en/free_nfr_license.htm and check it out for yourself.

You may be thinking; enough with the links already, let's talk cash!
Right you are! The per socket acquisition cost of Nakivo Backup & Replication is approximately half of the per socket cost of Veeam Standard. The annual support fee is lower as well.

I am using Veeam myself, and have support paid up through 2015, but since switching to Nakivo would lower my annual support cost by close to 30% I am considering to take advantage of Nakivo's Easy Switch promo: http://nakivo.com/Resources/NBR-ES.pdf (pay 2 years of support, get the software at no additional charge). The Easy Switch promo expires on December 23, 2013.

Full disclosure: I do not work for Nakivo, I don't work for any of their partners, I am not in any kind of sales channel and have no financial ties to the company at all. I did participate in the alpha and beta programs.

Once the lab is up and running again I'll check it out. Still using Veeam until 2015 myself as well. Not that it isn't a good product, but they keep inserting products that I'd like to try but require even higher than Enterprise. Silly considering the price of Enterprise.

I haven't looked at the product recently but 6 months ago this program had major issues. I couldn't even get it to run half decently. It was buggy and lacked way to many features. Trusting your backups to a Beta is another issue I have with.

Wrench00 said:

I haven't looked at the product recently but 6 months ago this program had major issues. I couldn't even get it to run half decently. It was buggy and lacked way to many features. Trusting your backups to a Beta is another issue I have with.

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Just out of curiosity, did you contact support about any of your issues?
Which features did you think it should have that it didn't have?

Nearly every version increase added more features, with version 4 adding two major Enterprise class features. In our production environment we have departmental resource pools where personnel from that department provisions and manages the VMs within that pool. Being able to give them access to self-restore is going to be a big help for us and that feature will come at roughly 1/3 of the cost of Veeam.

I have nothing bad to say about Veeam. There are a couple things that could work better/easier, i.e. transitioning from one backup server to another and taking the old backups along. Version 7 of Veeam finally added the ability to have two different backup schedules for the same backup job, so you can do your dailies and save a weekly somewhere else within the same job. But in years of using Veeam I didn't have to contact support once, so I am not inclined to pay a lot for support.

Back to Nakivo, as a tester one has obviously more insight into features and functionality than first-time users, but from my personal experience getting Nakivo to run is just a matter of clicking a couple buttons and it's done. Setting up backup jobs is super simple. Not sure what to make of your comment that you "couldn't even get it to run half decently" because that's substantially different than my experience has been. I'd be curious to hear whether there's something that was overlooked in testing.

It was an old version at the time they had only replication working great. I had backups just Fail all the time I didn't have time to spend a lot of time on techsupport. Granted I had veeam working on the same network with out the problem. The backups just failed and I couldn't figure out why and the logs weren't very descriptive. (Simply kind of gave up in a way) I was interested in the product but with my workload beta testing is not something I was to interested in. What I was really interested was a stand along Appliance rather install on a Windows License.

One thing that has disappointed me with Veeam 7 is that in now requires Server edition. For my small clients I just installed veeam on a 7 Workstation.


I have tons of little clients rather then one big one so its very different for me.

I might revisit the program now that it has matured but my time is very busy and compressed with work and trying to upgrade my MCITP is also sucking up my time.

It's definately made big strides in the past year. I have several clients using it now, from the $1 promotion when it first came out.

I didn't try the stand-alone appliance yet myself, it's on my TODO list for my home lab, but there's so little time.

I think that especially in the SMB market the virtual appliance could be great to reduce OS licensing and OS patching costs.

Somewhat related; time is the biggest challenge in all of the software evaluations. I have a whole stack of software that could potentially be beneficial to us but finding the time to test it out is the hardest part of the process. I recently took the plunge and just bought the large file exchange appliance from LiquidFiles.net and just deployed it into production untested. Looked good enough, and it does work, my users love it, got over 30 people to start using it in the first week of deployment.

Thuleman said:

I didn't try the stand-alone appliance yet myself, it's on my TODO list for my home lab, but there's so little time.

I think that especially in the SMB market the virtual appliance could be great to reduce OS licensing and OS patching costs.

Somewhat related; time is the biggest challenge in all of the software evaluations. I have a whole stack of software that could potentially be beneficial to us but finding the time to test it out is the hardest part of the process. I recently took the plunge and just bought the large file exchange appliance from LiquidFiles.net and just deployed it into production untested. Looked good enough, and it does work, my users love it, got over 30 people to start using it in the first week of deployment.

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I feel the pinch I simply don't have the time to test stuff. Most times its the Stupid MS shit that slows me down. I still find it so perplexing that in the world of Internet of Things MS still hasn't clued into appliances but rather these stupid monolythic deployments. This is why I like vmware more not because of the products itself but because the environment is based on appliance structures. (I detest vcenter on windows just as much SCCM)

One thing I liked about nakivo, that was a more recent improvement, is you can run it completely on linux now. One more way to reduce cost for my SMB (well, small really, no mediums) clients. I have to trick it into running on centos (it specifically looks for redhat) by changing the redhat-release file, but other than that it works great. Using that instead of win7 saves me another 120 bucks.

dave99 said:

One thing I liked about nakivo, that was a more recent improvement, is you can run it completely on linux now. [...] I have to trick it into running on centos (it specifically looks for redhat) by changing the redhat-release file, but other than that it works great.

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Wouldn't it be better to just run the virtual appliance at that point?