Quest QoreStor Reviews

As a managed services provider, we use it to store the internal backups for our own data and our customer data. As an IT services provider and consultant for our customers, we help them implement it as backup storage on their premises or in the cloud.

Immediately after its deployment, we saw storage space savings and cost savings as compared to larger, more power-hungry equipment, which required more cooling in our data centers. It helped reduce our costs in terms of the size and the cost of the equipment.

We use Quest QoreStor as a backup solution alongside Quest vRanger.

We maintain our own ASP environment in our data center as well as an internal environment. It is running with the virtual servers in a VMware solution. For years, our backup solution had been running with vRanger which has stored backups on a local device in our data center. In addition to this, we had been running good old tape backups for external storage. We contacted Quest and found out about the QoreStor product, so now, we use vRanger backup, and we store the backup on the QoreStor Server. In addition to that, we are using Blob Storage from Microsoft for external backup.

The extreme compression of data is a big thing for us. We were looking for an online backup solution, and QoreStor is very good in terms of data compression. It helps us minimize the required storage in the Blob Storage environment.

In addition, it is more affordable compared to others. For example, Veeam's pricing was nearly double what Quest offered us.

It runs on Linux which is good. Linux is harder to infiltrate by ransomware and things like that.

The solution is the means for taking our NetVault backups and handing them off to QoreStor for all the dedupe and compression. We keep them temporarily on disk for a short period of time, like a week or two, but then we start replicating up into the cloud, within six hours of backup. In summary, we use it primarily for backup and restore.

We're currently on-premises. We're a pretty small organization, but we have a cabinet in a co-location facility and we have QoreStor there, in our infrastructure. It's a virtual infrastructure but we control it.

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.

We are using QoreStor internally for our backup, and we are also a reseller of QoreStor.

Two years ago, we had two backup solutions: one for IBM i and one for HP NonStop. We started to offer QoreStor with our SPHiNX 9.7 to our IBM i customers two years ago, and last year, we started to offer QoreStor with our BackBox 4.09 to our HP NonStop customers. 

It provides data deduplication, replication, and archiving capabilities in one solution, which is very important for us. We built a relationship with QoreStor because we needed data deduplication, replication, and encryption.

QoreStor works with different backup solutions in the market, and they have a list of backup solutions that they support, but what interests us is just the QoreStor technicalization. We provide a backup solution for legacy systems that don't support the market backup tools. We provide a backup solution for such legacy systems, and then we store the backup into QoreStor. So, we are in the middle. For legacy NonStop and legacy IBM i solutions, customers can put ETI-NET as a backup solution that QoreStor supports.

It has reduced our backup cost because it is all automated. It is dedupe. We didn't take advantage of the cloud yet, but even for storing locally, there is a big reduction. We also reduced the footprint because the software can run on the same platform as our solution. The average reduction rate is about 20 times. We can reduce the cost by at least 10 times, and the footprint and the storage hardware are reduced by about a half.

We have two appliances that we use for replication.

We have one in our production facility and then we have one in our corporate office. Each is being used as local backup repositories, and each replicates to the other. This means that not only do we have an onsite local backup, but we're also using it as a convenient type of offsite backup for replication and data deduplication.

QoreStor's compatibility with server and storage hardware was helpful to us when we migrated from our previous solution. When we switched from the DR Series, those were pre-built appliances, and QoreStor offered the option of providing our own hardware. We took advantage of that, and we had fewer problems because we are now in control of the operating system and the updates of the hardware. It makes it much more manageable for us to keep it up to date with security patches and updates and drivers. In general, we can manage it much better.

Although I can't include any metrics, I can certainly say that QoreStor has improved the way our organization functions. We've got a pretty small IT shop, so the fact that we're not swapping tapes for our tape backup system and we are actively using the QoreStor product, that saves us a lot of time and from performing certain physical activities. This has enabled us to be offsite more for remote work, which really came in handy during the pandemic. Not having to be onsite to swap tapes on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, alone, has really paid for its usage through the savings in time.

This product has definitely helped us replicate for the purpose of recovery backups. However, it seems to have increased network traffic because of that replication. With respect to typical backups, there has been some reduction in network usage and the related bandwidth, but the replication usage skyrocketed once we started using the product because we weren't replicating before.

Deduplication is important to us because anything that impacts bandwidth also impacts our other servers, and our clients' ability to access those servers. This is why it's important that we don't saturate our bandwidth with replication traffic. We do have the ability to move replication traffic to a different subnet, which is something that we're looking into doing within the next couple of months.

Overall, QuorStor has helped to reduce our storage requirements. In our prior setup, we had boxes and boxes of tapes that were between one and three terabytes each. They were used in the tape drives and we had to manage them on a daily basis. Getting rid of those meant that we got rid of the physical requirement for the tapes, the additional cost of replacing them in a timely manner, and the labor involved with swapping them. At 35% capacity, we still have plenty of available storage on the appliance that we built up for QoreStor and the licenses that go along with it. Definitely, QuorStor has reduced our need for those additional products and labor-intensive actions of swapping tapes.

The product has marginally improved our overall storage management costs. When you consider the cost of licensing QoreStor is a bit high, as well as the cost for the hardware that we selected, there is not a large saving. The hardware cost was something that we implemented ourselves based on our evaluation of hardware. In isolation, QoreStor would have reduced our cost but we invested heavily in hardware, which probably raised the cost to a point that some people would not necessarily see if they just went for a base system.

At our company, we use QoreStor for data recovery and to improve the efficiency of data backup and recovery operations. We are also resellers of the solution.

What I find the most valuable about QoreStor is the data deduplication. It integrates with various backup software solutions, which makes it compatible with existing backup workflows and processes.

We presented QoreStor to NetVault, the backup software. We have two QoreStors, one on the main site, and then another one on the remote site. They are a primary backup and a secondary backup target.

One of the benefits is that with QoreStor, we can use a different hardware platform. For example, we have data center hardware from Dell EMC. So we only have the Dell EMC server plus a QoreStor on top of the Dell EMC server. That means that we can't get support for all of the hardware for Dell EMC from them. The software comes from the QoreStor request.

QoreStor has helped to reduce our backup storage requirements on-premise by at least 90%.

QoreStor is a backup target for us. 

When Dell DR4100 was sold by Dell, it had another piece of software tied to it that was built by Quest. Then when Quest and Dell separated again, Quest developed QoreStor and they separated the license from the hardware, which became QoreStor. We converted it to QoreStor to continue using the hardware and get support and updates to the software. That is our backup target for our Veeam software. When we run backups, they go to QoreStor.

We're a small shop, so it's easy to use software. It's relatively easy to maintain and for a small amount of people. It's not like you have to have a whole staff to take care of it.

The deduplication has helped us reduce our storage.

When we added this solution to our architecture, our existing backup solution provided deduplication.

QoreStor has helped us to reduce our backup storage requirements on-premises. We've been using the same devices for quite a while, and so it lets us keep using them as opposed to having to rip out all that hardware and create a new on-prem solution. The advantage here is even if we had to retire the hardware tomorrow, the QoreStor part doesn't change. We just have to have additional hardware and put the solution back on whatever hardware we pick and it'll do the same thing.

It has also helped to reduce our backup storage costs.