Quest Rapid Recovery vs. StarWind Virtual Tape Library

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.

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Starwind VTL is a great solution for customers that want the benefits of a physical tape library without the hefty price tag and the manual intervention required when changing tapes as it is automated. In addition, Starwind VTL virtual tapes are "air-gapped" as they are in LTO format.

• 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).

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• Allows you to use Veeam and other software that uses Virtual Tape Libraries while getting rid of actual tape drives and tapes
• Backblaze B2 implementation is great - keeps storage costs low while automating backups to the cloud storage
• Low cost and great support by the Starwind technical team
• Feature-rich and in constant development

• 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.

• Set-up is confusing.

Their support is great and the interface is not as user friendly

The initial setup took some time, however, with the help of the Starwind technical team, we were able to set it up from start to finish including seamlessly adding it to our existing backup solution. After that, there was no need for any additional setup or troubleshooting.

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.

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Great and reliable product with little need for support

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

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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

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We've looked at physical tape backups, however, the infrastructure is too costly compared to Starwind VTL and it also requires manual changing of tapes that users will not want to do or forget to do. With VTL, it works exactly like a physical tape library with the same benefits and full automation.

• 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.

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• ROI was immediate as we got rid of expensive sneakernet backups with hard drives in a Pelican case
• One-time cost of the product is very cost-effective
• Support contracts are reasonable and we received excellent support throughout
• We have much better peace-of-mind with our data being protected better