Getting rid of tape was pretty huge. We managed with it but it was clunky and slow. The context here is that we've been running NetVault Backup for a decade or more, so we were already Quest customers. That's where we got into backup originally and we've been with that backup system for a very long time. We're very comfortable using NetVault, but it's single-threaded on tape. You can only run a single backup job at a time. That meant we had to be careful about the scheduling of backups. We couldn't have one backup run too long because it was going to cut into the time of another backup. We had to try to keep the backup windows pretty tight and, as we got more stuff to back up, it was getting trickier to keep those windows synchronized. So the first benefit of Qorestor was getting rid of tape. QoreStor allows you to multi-thread backups, and that gets rid of having to be so careful about the timing of everything. Because it's snapshotting, you can run it any time of day. I still tend to run backups in the early morning, but not every job can run in the early morning. As a result, things run throughout the day. Another aspect is the cloud. Putting data up into the cloud gives me another way to have security around that data. It's not just on-premises now. It's both on-premises and in cloud, so I've got the best of both worlds. Overall, it simplifies the management of backup and gives me a more secure feeling that my data is going to be available if I need to retrieve it. It's mostly an efficiency thing for us at this point. In the old days, we used to have to go swap tapes out. As a small company, we didn't work with an Iron Mountain or the like to store offsite tapes for us. I would just take them home with me or put them in my office so that if we lost our data center we'd still have data on tape somewhere. So Qorestor is more efficient and gives us a more fluid operation. In terms of the amount of time it's saving us, I would probably swap tapes once a month or once every other month. That is not a lot of time, but the trip might take half a day every month to go to the data center, swap the tapes around, and take them home. Using the low-end tape library was not always as efficient as I would have liked. It wasn't terribly sophisticated. Sometimes we had to mess around to get it to work correctly. So I would estimate Qorestor is saving us a day a month, at a minimum. Also, although we don't restore that often, if you did have to do a lot of restoring, the speed of restoring off of disk, versus tape, is pretty nice. Qorestor has reduced our storage-related costs mostly in terms of the cost of labor, rather than in equipment or licensing. In terms of just the management of the system, the time I spend is likely where the savings are.
