Quest Rapid Recovery vs. vSphere Data Protection Advanced (discontinued)

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

VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced is well suited for a thin client environment, and/or an environment that runs multiple virtual servers. It is also well suited for an environment with disaster recover requirements that require backups of everything. vSphere is very expensive, so it would probably not be a very good choice for a startup that could use a cheaper alternative in the beginning, or a physical machine environment.

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

• Maintains backups of all virtual systems for disaster recovery compliance.
• Supports plugins for backups of Microsoft systems.
• As with most VMware products vSphere is incredibly easy to use.

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.

• Reports are too complex, could be made clearer.
• The interface could be simplified.
• Backups of physical servers take a very long time.

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

CloudBacko is the only similar product that I have used, and while it worked by backing up my virtual machines to Google Drive, VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced not only backs up the virtual machines, buton databases, physical servers and more, and backs them up to a centralized location, and has 24/7 live support.

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

• Virtual machines and servers are backed up and secure
• DR compliance is met
• Multiple platforms backed up to a central location

Incentivized