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
VMware Site Recovery (DRaaS)
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
VMware offers Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) via the VMware Site Recovery DRaaS for on-premise workloads or AWS, VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery on-demand DRaaS delivered as a SaaS solution, or Cloud Provider Disaster Recovery Solutions DRaaS offerd through accredited VMware partners.
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.
VMware Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery tools are well suited for customers who are heavily integrated with vSphere and VMs for their on-premises data centers today. VMware Cloud on AWS is great for customers who do not have DR sites and want to leverage the public cloud to build a DR site on demand quickly.
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.
VMware support is typically outstanding, of course, they have multiple departments, and you need to work with the specific teams to get advanced support for things specific to VMware Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery. In contrast, other companies that deal directly with that technology may be more responsive to those specifics. Typically VMware is excellent and helpful in critical outages. For smaller to medium issues, it can take some time to get addressed appropriately.
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
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
VMware is software and typically hardware agnostic, this does require extra design and consideration versus putting in backup appliances. Some other solutions are a software as well and can be layered on top of vSphere to enhance existing environments. We need to weigh the benefits of licensing versus software costs and the management cost of having multiple tools.
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.
