Quest Rapid Recovery vs. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows

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.

Incentivized

We use it as a Simple Deployment. As a simple deployment scenario, the roles of the backup server, VMware backup proxy, and backup repository are assigned to a single machine. These roles are assigned automatically to the machine where we installed Veeam Backup & Replication. The drawback of the simple deployment scenario is that only the backup server handles and stores all data which is a single point of failure.

Incentivized

• 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).

Incentivized

• File level restore
• Backing up of difficult Laptops that are in and off the network
• Reporting
• Integration into other Veeam Products

Incentivized

• 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.

• Stop the backup job from the console instead of having to stop from the client.
• Don't consume too many resources while taking a backup.

Incentivized

Overall, Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows is a great backup solution and supplies extremely useful tools to configure backups to suite our needs and our clients requirements. I have only taken some points off as the user interface could be easier to navigate when configuring backups and the ability to update Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows from within the software would be appreciated.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Veeam is just on another level compared to most other software vendors who tend to make backup solutions complicated. Veeam uses intuitive GUI's that make sense to most people and take the stress out of systems recovery at high and low levels by simply explaining the process step by step.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It allows end users to easily self-serve their own file restores, freeing up IT resources
• It provides a seamless DR solution for the resources it backs up
• It frequently take a long time to resolve problems when they do occur

Incentivized