Not Rolls Royce but probably Mercedes…

What are the best aspects of this product?

Cheaper than Veeam, better than some other options. The proof is in the recovery!
The licensing is quite flexible too, with perpetual and subscription licenses. The cost comparison between licensing the CPU sockets in a hypervisor vs the annual subscription to protect the virtual machines is one part of how you'd decide which type to choose.

Support is mostly responsive and at least half my questions are answered accurately in the first or second interaction. When issues are escalated to higher tiers it takes a little longer, but I have had success with remote sessions and VoIP calls with their engineers who are refreshingly knowledgeable on the various operating systems I've had their product installed on, and were more than willing to go beyond their minimum scope of supporting only the Nakivo product.

Easy to set up and get running.
Flexible deployment, with the full solution (i.e. the "brain") running directly on supported NAS hardware, Linux OS, physical or virtual machines.
Getting help is as easy as clicking "Request Support" on an error message in the WebUI. A support bundle is created and sent to Nakivo and you very quickly receive an email with a case number, followed by responses from real people.

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

It's more focussed on VMWare than Hyper-V but support for Hyper-V is acceptable. Just be sure you are familiar with the features that are and are not supported for the platform you wish to protect before proceeding.

Better error messages would be nice - they don't always make sense.
The "brain", which is the Director component, can only exist in one place in a distributed deployment with different locations. This means that a remote site will not back up if there is a connectivity issue between sites and the Director cannot see the transporter and repositories at the remote site.

What features/services would you like to see in future versions of this product?

Decentralised "Director" role, being able to delegate the function to slave installations at remote sites.
Better recovery of Hyper-V VMs that were backed up using a subscription, which forces one to create backups as if the VMs were physical servers. Universal recovery is the only option which exports only the VHDX files and renames them, and one then has to recreate the virtual machine configuration and attach the VHDX files. This leads to reactivation of the Windows operating system due to a total replacement of the emulated hardware.

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

We manage Nakivo backup installations in several clients' local networks and receive backup copies to our own infrastructure. This is very easy to set up and easy to sell. Additionally, I can attest to the recoverability - I've had to use it a few times for at least four of our customers and the results in most cases have been stellar.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes