LiveVault is a data backup and recovery option acquired by J2 Global from Iron Mountain.
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Quest Rapid Recovery
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Quest Rapid Recovery is a data backup and restore offering from Dell. It provides virtual standby, encryption, replication, deduplication, and the ability for users to run without restore.
Our company was originally with VaultLogix which was taken over by LiveVault. The transition to the new product was not as smooth as expected and presented us with issues especially with a restore. Restore and what files needed to be included in the backup policy were not communicated to us correctly and it was not until a customer's server failed that we found out we couldn't do a restore because we were missing files that were needed for a complete restore.
I don't believe it works very well for backups of virtual servers. Installation of the product is user-friendly.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
LiveVault is the only product we have used. The reason is that we chose it initially was the fact you can restore individual files. Also that the data is transferred offsite to a secure data center and data is backed up again, providing a second offsite copy.
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
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.
