Likelihood to Recommend Well suited: scenarios with very specific backups schedules; backups saved in tape libraries. Less appropriate: environments with older Operational Systems and older hardware, such as tape libraries.
Read full review AppAssure works well for quick access to point in time backups of Windows machines without having to do a complete restore. The virtual standby function is useful as a disaster recovery or high availability solution. Recent upgrades to the product and rebranding to Rapid Recovery look promising. If your Linux machines are mission [critical] make sure your administrators test restores so they can perform them in a timely manner should the need arise.
Read full review Pros It is very reliable on the server side to provide a trustworthy back end. The install was simple and provided an easy way to install and backup Unix servers. The support was always helpful and responded quickly. Read full review Continuous backup with deduplication and compression The P to V function of the software is create. To be able to back up physical machines and create a hot spare on a virtual environment was a great selling point. Can back up physical and virtual (ESX or Hyper-V). Read full review Cons Increase the range of support for new platforms. Improve the attention of support cases in terms of speed of attention. Keep me better informed of the latest solution updates. Read full review Support for newer operating systems (Windows, Linux, VMware) is slow to be added. Usually takes 3-6 months from the new version being released for it to be supported. There is no way to automate the testing of the virtual standby which a lot of comparable products are able to do. The software has a backup type called "base image" which is essentially taking a full backup after an unexpected shutdown of the server. If your servers crash and they are very large, this may impact your storage requirements significantly. They do now have synthetic full backups which alleviate this issue a bit but they are not perfect either. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It was just not a good fit for our organization. We have an EMC SAN, Data Domain backup storage, and VMWare. Without any other HP software or hardware in our environment I do not see the need to continue using a product that is not well integrated with our other brands
Read full review Usability Very easy to use. What needs to improve is to make it easier to configure some integrations and features, such as office 365 integration, acropolis integration, block change-based backup, etc. Despite we have documentation, even following all the steps, the integration is hard to implement or doesn't work in the end.
Read full review Performance The Reporting-Server and the Reports depend on the settings.
Read full review Support Rating It is the weak point of this software, although it is improving little by a little. The first level of support does not solve almost anything until you move on to a higher level that is more involved.
Read full review In the very few instances we've needed support they have been quick, friendly, knowledgeable, and dedicated to servicing our needs. That has only improved since AppAssure was bought out by Quest.
Read full review Implementation Rating Pick one person to help you through the process.
Read full review Our initial installation really was not optimum. With the help from Dell Profession Services we were able to get our implementation sized correctly and better understand how to get better deduplication results
Read full review Alternatives Considered When selecting a backup solution for our virtual environment we chose HP Data Protector for its cost savings in licensing, our familiarity with the software and the ability to backup to disk, tape or both with the standard installation.
Read full review I've been using Rapid Recovery for the last 6 years and before that we had used Backup Exec, but it was a different implementation as we were still running backups to LTO3 tapes using the full/incremental backup schemes. So Rapid Recovery (AppAssure at the time) was a big change for us, backing up to disk instead with base images and changes. I would assume Backup Exec can do this as well, but haven't used it since switching.
NovaBACKUP was a lower cost solution that seemed geared towards smaller and simpler configurations
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model Here the license model from the Micro Focus Data Protector and DP4CW should merge. It causes argumentation problems if you license two products here.
Read full review Scalability We use the tool in different installations and combinations of functions and hardware.
Read full review Professional Services The professional services had some details of low promptness in the attention of cases.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive impact. I have not worked with HP Data Protector enough to provide the ROI. It simply worked when we needed it to. Read full review AppAssure paid for itself in the first year of usage. A user deleted a major file in our SharePoint sub-site, we used the DocRetriever for SharePoint Console and were able to go back to a particular incremental date and retrieved that file. One of our file shares crashed and we were able to put the physical server on a virtual standby which saved us hours of imaging and restoring of data. This allowed employees to efficiently continue their daily work without much downtime. The offsite replication alone has put an ease on the company in case of any disaster. When Hurricane Sandy hit, we didn't have a solution in place which put us on pins and needles to say the least. But with AppAssure we will be able to have some comfort that all of our mission critical data is being offloaded onto our other sites. Read full review ScreenShots OpenText Data Protector Screenshots