Carbonite E2 Appliance: A Solid Hybrid Backup Solution
Back on Oct 15, 2016 I reported that Diversified had been selected by Carbonite as a field tester for their new E2 Hybrid Appliance. You can read that article here. Today I am ready to report that the E2 appliance is a solid hybrid backup solution worthy of your consideration. The E2 appliance is designed for companies with up to 1TB of business-critical data and is priced on an annual basis.
We worked closely with the E2 Product Team during our testing period and provided Carbonite with a lot of, what we hope was, valuable day-to-day feedback via Skype and email. The initial base setup of the E2 appliance was easy as detailed by their single 8.5 x 11 glossy instruction sheet. We did however encounter a problem with one of the E2's dual network ports which forced us to call the Product Team for support. There was some discussion by the team regarding whether the E2 appliance was shipping with one port intentionally disabled or if it was a bad port. It was decided that only one port was currently enabled in our testing unit. We did note that their hardcopy instructions incorrectly marked which network port to use.
In our testing we setup our backup job twice. First, we setup our backup job on our own, without help, and documented our questions. During our second setup, we kept E2 Product Team on the phone and had them walk us through the entire process. While the setup was easy there were a few instances where we were glad to have support on the phone such as when it was discovered that the IP address stored within the cloud portal needed to be updated to match the new IP used by the E2 appliance.
Once properly configured the E2 is pretty much "hands off" unless your nightly backup email reports an issue which we found to be rare. The cloud dashboard is easy to use especially once you have created a couple of backup configurations.
The true test is the restoration process. Every I.T. person appreciates an easy to use, and quick, restoration procedure. We found the E2 restoration process to be so easy to perform that we could remember the process months later. We also found that restores complete very quickly because the cloud dashboard attempts to restore from your local appliance first. We are told that the cloud restoration only occurs if the local E2 appliance is unavailable. The critical thing to remember during any restore process is that you will need to enter a unique key that you created during the setup of the backup job. Without that unique key you cannot restore the file(s).
CARBONITE PRODUCT TEAM TESTIMONIAL
"We worked closely with Diversified in testing one of our new product offerings and were very impressed with their thoroughness and attention to detail. They were great to work with and provided invaluable feedback on every aspect of the customer experience. Their professionalism and responsiveness throughout our engagement were also unmatched."
- Tom Powers, Carbonite Senior Program Manager
INTERNAL LINKS
Carbonite Selects Diversified To Test New E2 Hybrid Backup Appliance
EXTERNAL LINKS
Introducing E2: Powerful hybrid backup designed for small business.
Blog article by Carbonite.
