As businesses adopt a cloud-first strategy, reducing on-premises infrastructure and moving IT and business applications to the cloud, the limitations and costs of traditional data protection and disaster recovery become more apparent. Druva Phoenix™ provides a cloud-native approach that helps businesses accelerate their journey to the cloud by reducing infrastructure management and improving business resilience. Delivered as-a-service, Druva Phoenix boasts…
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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.
Durva Phoenix is well suited for the VMware platform and has great restore functionality during disaster recovery. We use a different VM platform so our disaster recovery has a longer timeline if there is a critical failure as we need to get a base OS loaded before we can restore the VM data to it. This is the tradeoff between an expensive VM platform and a near free VM platform. Druva Phoenix is well suited to file version recovery if a previous data state is required by your employees or customers. Very quick to restore.
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.
The best part about Druva is that you deploy, which is fairly easy especially with your technical rep being available for the whole process, and then you let the system do your work. If a backup fails I get a report, there is no need to check it every day or even weekly.
The file server backup is great. Searching is easy and the capability to pull back a full folder or individual file makes life a lot easier to support my end users.
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).
The UI is good, but a bit inconsistent. Some types of backups are shown differently to others. It never gets in the way, but a bit more consistency would be good.
The system is usage based, which is understandable, but a shock after using inSync, their other backup product, which is not. Careful planning and thought is needed if you are on a tight budget
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.
Certain backup solutions can be cumbersome on how they actually work. Where that's properly deploying hardware or software that will house the backups. Druva is different where the software and infrastructure is completely managed. All we needed to do is deploy agents and proxies and point the backups to Druva Phoenix
It's been pretty easy to get a hold of the Support team and they work well to resolve our issues. I wish I could email support directly (which we used to be able to do) versus having to login to the console and report an issue from there, that's a feature I'd like to see brought back but otherwise, their Support team is pleasant to work with.
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
Druva stacks up well against its competitors. I do not remember it being at a disadvantage in any category. Phoenix couldn't provide message-level restore on an on-premise Exchange server but after we moved to the cloud that requirement went away.
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
This is a necessary service to keep your information safe. I would not say that there is a tangible ROI unless you reach a point where your server gets attacked and wiped-out. Then, you can recover your information in an easy manner, which could represent a potential several-thousand-dollar savings.
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.
