Initially, we started out with DL4000. We have added onto that in the form of external storage because DL4000 itself really was not conducive to adding additional drives, but in all honesty, I feel like the ability to add external storage has actually opened up a lot of opportunities for us to change our environment.

We initially were licensed for an appliance, and just this last year, we converted our license to allow us to build a new core just on a new piece of hardware. Ultimately, because our DL4000 is six years old, we wanted to have a new core built so that in the event DL4000 starts to fail because it is a physical device, we could easily roll on to the new core that we're building. So, from a scalability standpoint, we added more storage, and now, we've converted our license so that we can build a new core, and subsequently, we can just have storage attached rather than all in one appliance.

It is just two of us who work with this solution. It is primarily me, but I do have a counterpart who is my backup. So, if I'm away or out of town, he can step in, take over, and check things. He can add or delete, whatever the case may be, but primarily, I run it. Obviously, he is always kept in the loop so that if something does come up, he is aware and knows what needs to be done, but primarily, it is my baby, and I take care of it.

I don't have any plans to increase usage, but the only reason for that is because I feel as though we are already using it to its full capacity within our organization. We have it backing up every single one of our servers. The only other thing that potentially could change would be if we would decide that we wanted to start backing up every client machine, but at this point, I don't believe that we would ever do that.

It is pretty scalable. If you want to increase the amount of space you need, you can just add some licensing. It is pretty straightforward. It seems pretty scalable to me.

In terms of users, it is pretty much just me, so it is just the Systems and Network Administrator.

In terms of usage, we probably use it 70%. We restore once every couple of months if somebody needs something, but that's about it. I don't see that changing. Its usage will remain the same. We may just need more disk space.

We're pretty small so we haven't scaled much beyond the on-site with an offsite replication.

There are two IT admin positions who use it and no end users. They monitor the server replication, licensing, and all of that, as well as add moves and changes if we deploy a new server or that isn't automatically covered through our VMware configuration or a new workstation that needs to have a physical license for itself as well.

In terms of the maintenance required, it's just software updates, or maintenance if a host goes offline and is no longer being backed up. It's kind of a check and balance but is that because the connection to that host is down, or is that because that host was decommissioned but nobody updated the Rapid Recovery system accordingly? 

We're updating our infrastructure, so we plan to move our Rapid Recovery and upgrade to the latest versions, but I think its depth and penetration within our infrastructure will probably remain the same.

The solution is scalable. It depends on the appliance backup disk. I use the DD 6300. Only two users from the admin side are using the tool.

Quest Rapid Recovery is a scalable solution, but it's not as scalable as NetVault.

It fits us exactly as a company, it meets all of our needs, the way that we use it just for doing backups. We do have three different facilities and that allows us to do data backups on all three of the virtual machine hosts.

Our company's around eight to 10 terabytes in terms of complete data. We have to make sure we have enough space for that. We do actually have a new Dell server coming here that we're going to work with the Quest folks to migrate the repository for. That's going to be around 25 terabytes. It'll allow us to go even further back. So, we're continuing to work with quest support to maintain that relationship and keep upgrading our company as we get bigger.

My IT director and I are involved in the maintenance every once in a while. I'm the core administrator of this software.

This product is quite scalable. I'm quite impressed with the way Rapid Recovery handles scale and the ability to expand it. As our customers migrate from NetVaule to Rapid Recovery, we increase our own total storage space and it's easy to do.

In the first two years, we subscribed to 13 TB of data. Now in our third year, it has been increased to 18 TB. Because the product is profitable and working well, the company is planning to increase usage. Eventually, all of the servers will be put into Rapid Recovery and additional licensing will be purchased.

In our environment, there are two administrators for this solution. One handles the customers and the other is internal. Between them, we have full visibility.

I would rate the scalability of the product as a nine out of ten. In my company, approximately 1,000 VMs and around 50 physical clients are currently using Quest Rapid Recovery. In terms of overall usage, the solution is active 24/7 to ensure continuous data protection and recovery capabilities for our systems. We plan to expand its usage.

If you're a big company then the scalability is quite good. In fact, it is probably one of the best. It depends on how much money you've got to spend. That would be the first thing, especially with the hardware and the data centers.

You could have a third site, which would be a further repository for backups. As it is now, I've got a local site, and storage space on Azure, but if I had another local site where I could use the same repository then it would provide greater redundancy. Instead of having the third site locally, at the same location, it would be somewhere else.

What we've got now is probably the best model for the school. I think a lot of small businesses would probably have the same sort of model that I've got, which is an on-premise server and an off-site server. Depending on their solution, they might have an off-site solution in another location, maybe a few kilometers away from where they are or they might have chosen to use Amazon, or Google, or Azure as the other site to replicate the data to.

Ultimately, I think you have to work out the perfect model for your business, but also, you've got to also think about the costs involved, and you've also got to think about whether it is worth having three sites or just two sites.

This choice depends in part on how important the data is. Normally, the data is very important because that's the most crucial thing for any business. The loss of their data is catastrophic, so to speak. What I've got is on-premises data, with replication that takes place on the Azure site. Plus, on top of that, I've got a nightly backup of the data. I think I've covered every area that I could for the school, and also, the local backup disks that I use are kept in a fire safe. In the unfortunate event that you lost everything, you've still got the backup disk to use for a rebuild, just in case you needed to do one.

I think the problem is that you've got to work out different scenarios. The first scenario would be that you lose the building. What do you do? In this case, you've got your off-site backup, Azure. It will probably take one or two days to get the necessary servers up and running, as virtual machines built on the Azure platform. Then, you've got to get the users. They can be anywhere in the world, remote in through the terminal server, and then they can access the file server or the SQL server or whatever services are available.

Every situation for every business is unique. It depends on what applications you've got and what servers you've got. We are a school but another business might be a pharmaceutical company or it could be an airline. Whatever the business, every company has got to have some solution in place for disaster recovery. That was the model that I decided to follow, and Quest plays an important role in that.

The solution is very easy to scale. We've already increased our usage since deployment.

Its scalability is excellent. I have around five terabytes of data. We only have 50 servers.

This is not really applicable because my organizations are very small.

There were no major scalability issues. This is usually license based.

The solution has good scalability.

It's relatively scalable. We have 21 users. 

It was deployed by the IT department. It's not used by a user. We use it to replicate applications to another point, as another disaster recovery measure. 

Scalability on the solution is great, but you need more resources or to make more backups. You need some RAM memory, more space, to scale.

In my opinion, it's designed more for mid-sized, enterprise-level organizations, although if larger orgs use it, they'll have to add additional physical core servers, as Dell recommends not exceeding 130 clients per core server (although we are using 180 on ours but that's taxing it). We have about 75TB of storage supported by AppAssure for those clients, split into four repositories; some SAN, some DAS.