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.
$1,819.99
Rubrik
Score 8.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Rubrik is cloud data management and enterprise backup software provided by Palo Alto-based Rubrik, Inc. It is a software platform that provides backup, instant recovery, archival, search, analytics, compliance, and copy data management in one secure fabric across data centers and clouds.
With the exception of Backup Exec's GRT I rate all features of Rubrik above the competitors i have used. To restore single mail items one must mount the volume/DB into a Kroll server (License provided on request from Rubrik)
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.
Rubrik is still a relatively new product when compared to other solutions which tackle total data protection. The feature set is quite broad but still needs some refinements. Most of the User Interface is quite straightforward and easy, but some areas are a bit lacking in a description of what the option is used for, or the option is missing. While making the user experience easy, many tunables aren’t present and require a Support Tunnel to be open for a Support person to make a change in the customer’s environment. Seems the first question Support always asks is if you can open a tunnel for them to remote in. Then you’re not able to monitor exactly what they’re doing.
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.
Automated test restores. I would love to setup automated and random test restores on a regular basis where Rubrik's system will restore a random file or directory to a test SharePoint folder, send a full report, and provide a path to the folder for review and confirmation.
The support has been incredible. Any time we have had a question, it has always been answered within 24hrs. Also, the team is always will to hop on a Zoom call to help walk us through the dashboard and troubleshoot any issues we are having. Also, having the peace of mind that our data is protected should anything happen in our system.
The support is top notch both tech and sales team, the tools are simple to use and yet still is feature rich. Security is top of the list, the product is sold and reliable, easy to configure and intuitive to use.
Rubrik's brik is designed with redundancy in mind, ensuring that if one node experiences issues, others can continue to provide backup and recovery services.
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.
Rubrik support has been pretty good. There have been a few issues with new releases we have experienced and are still considering if we want to make the jump to version nine. There are a few things we are concerned about which are giving us pause. That being said, support is working hard to answer our questions.
The interaction with the teacher is great and usually provides tons of opportunity for questions. The students questions are great to generate discussions and touching base the certification topic.
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
From experience the implementation was smooth and easy, like a simple plug and play format but would need coordination from your network team to be able to see the entire IT infrastructure.
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
Having all our backups under one umbrella made product management easier, with not need to manage myltip contracts.
The additional analysis of the data after the fact gave insights into our user data, without the need for an addition product, or the impact on live data sets.
We are fine with the 1 year or 3 year support options that Rubrik has had. The support for the on-prem hardware has been great too. We've had them for quite a while (4+ years) and no end of support yet.
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.
