Is vSphere's Data Recover appliance 'production-ready'?

I have a smallish lab environment (16 x ESX4iU1 hosts and VC4U1) that I periodically want to backup.

Normally in production we snap to secondary SAN boxes then have disk-based VTL backups via NetBackup which eventually migrate to off-site removable disks but this seems like an overkill for my own kit.

I've spent a bit of time with vSphere's 'Data Recovery' appliance, it was easy enough to setup and I've not really ran into any issues with it but that doesn't mean I trust it fully.

Have you had any experiences with it, positive or negative that would help me decide whether to trust it or pay Symantec for more licences?

Thank you in advance.

We are going through a lot of issues with Vsphere4, VDR and a Virtual Appliance - it has been in operation for approx 3 months and I would have to say the backups are not very reliable. Occasionally the restore points either vanish completely or go "damaged" requiring restore from tape etc. Some days it starts to miss a particular server out and this has to be "fixed". Seemingly this can be caused by integrity checks running during the day but if our experience is anything to go by, this is very flaky.

Its a shame really as the option of a Deduplicated backup store with multiple recovery points readily available on disk looked great. Hopefully it will get sorted out.