Quorum OnQ Reviews

I am using Quorum OnQ for local file and application server backup and recovery, as well as local disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is delivered through individual virtual machines that we can spin up on-demand, or configure for automatic fail-over.

The OnQ platform duplicates these features, as well, as a data archive vault at a remote site. Data is transferred and archived to the remote site automatically.

This platform does the job that we needed multiple, disparate solutions to handle before.

Quorum OnQ has taken the guesswork out of backup/recovery and disaster recovery.  The holistic nature of the platform makes it a breeze to work with and test.

One of the biggest worries in an IT environment is the reliability of backup and DR. Will it work when we need it? I can see that OnQ is functioning properly and test the DR environment on a single pane of glass in just a few seconds. It lifts a huge burden from my shoulders and I rarely give it a second thought since implementing OnQ.

Local backup and file recovery are the features I use most but as a DR and archive platform, Quorum OnQ helps us check several compliance boxes, as well.

Solid technical support is another huge benefit. Whenever we need them, Quorum staff are always on top of it.

It would be beneficial if file culling could be more granular.

I have been using Quorum OnQ for almost 10 years.

This solution is rock solid.

We have actually scaled back from where we started with the solution because so much of our data has moved to the cloud.

World-class! Tech support staff is very responsive and extremely knowledgeable. I do not recall a single instance where an issue has to be escalated.

I used various, disparate solutions in the past to accomplish everything that OnQ does.

Implementation of OnQ was one of the easiest I have ever been involved in. Quorum was involved throughout the entire process, even sending a tech onsite to complete the install.

In-house with Quorum tech support assistance.

We also had a ransomware incident a few years back and OnQ saved the day. We were able to recover every file in just a few minutes. This cost savings on the loss of productivity for this incident alone paid for the solution multiple times over.

My advice is to take a look at both the on-premises and cloud offerings from Quorum. We have been using an on-premises solution but we will probably evaluate the cloud version come renewal time.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing OnQ.

The platform has been around for a while and is reliably rock solid. It already does everything that it advertises, really well. I have been in the IT industry for more than 30 years and there are very few platforms that I do not have at least a small annoyance to complain about, other than OnQ.

I have been using it for almost 10 years and I have yet to find a single fault with it. Quorum OnQ is one of the few solutions that I would recommend to a colleague without a single caveat.

We are a reseller and Quorum OnQ is one of the products that we sell to our clients.

As a reseller, we use our Quorum OnQ box for demonstration purposes, and for PoC purposes. We do not yet have any sales in this region.

The primary use case is quick HA and DR.

The most useful feature is the one-click recovery. It instantly boots up the protected VM.

This product is easy to use.

The user interface needs to be improved. It is good, albeit very simple and the look needs to be improved when compared to other products on the market.

I would prefer if there were an easier way to restore databases or applications. It would be good, for example, if the Quorum agent could do things like restore databases at the table level.

We have been selling Quorum OnQ for approximately one year.

This solution is very stable. We have tested it for approximately one year, so we have only had a problem once or twice.

Scalability is something that we haven't tested. We have not tried adding another box but from what I have read so far, I think that the scalability is good.

We have not tried to contact technical support because we don't have any sales in the region. At this point, we don't know anything about them.

As resellers, we are also selling NetBackup and Commvault. One of the complaints from our customers is that the Quorum is expensive, and they question why it is on par with these other products.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

When we quote the price of Quorum to customers, they find it expensive.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers. We have done several PoCs for our clients.

The most valuable feature is the ease of installation. It doesn't take long and we can set this product up to demonstrate for customers in a couple of hours. Also, any customer can easily install and configure it.

This solution is based on the Linux platform, which is more stable than Windows backup software. This also means that it is better than any other product when it comes to recovering from a ransomware attack.

I like this product because it is easy to use.

It is not as feature-rich as a product like Veeam.

Better integration with cloud-based solutions like Azure and Office 365 is needed.

Because this product is somewhat new on the market, the vendor needs to do more marketing to raise awareness about it.

There is a long-term retention capability but it is a separate license that is available at an additional cost.

We have been working with Quorum OnQ for one year.

In terms of stability, the feedback that we have received from our customers is good.

The majority of our customers are medium and enterprise-level organizations.

This is a good solution for medium-sized customers. It is easy to use and I am working on attracting more customers to it.

I have worked with other products including those by Veeam.

This system is easy to install and it can be completed in a few hours. It can be fully implemented within one day.

This is a product that works well, is easy to install, and easy to use. I would recommend it over other solutions.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We mostly use it for disaster recovery and high-availability. In case of a server failure, we can deploy a server and have the location up and running instantly, within minutes. And then, once the location closes, if we need to, we can do a full restore of the server to new or similar hardware. If it's something as simple as the server going down or becoming unresponsive, we can bring it up, use it for what's needed, and then just transfer the files that needed changing.

The locations don't even know that anything has happened because, if a server goes down they call me. In minutes, I have a virtual version of that server up and running as if nothing had ever happened. It's actually pretty awesome. It's not necessarily that it saves me time on anything. It saves me the headache of losing productivity from my users. In other words, if something were to happen to a physical server, none of my users would lose productivity throughout the day, and the business keeps going as usual.

An example of how it has helped us is that about a year-and-a-half ago, we had a physical server that completely failed. It was our primary domain controller. It's what sends all the instructions to every other domain server to tell it what to do. If it doesn't communicate, we lose a lot. We noticed weird errors happening on the server. We had a hardware technician here and we tried to check things and we tried to repair the actual file system but we lost the array so we lost the data. But, because of Quorum, within two minutes, the branch was back up and running. They knew nothing had happened.

That night, we completely restored that server. It took us about an hour to get everything back up and running. There were some minor configurations that we needed to change after we got the server up and running, the next day. And everything was back to normal. If we hadn't had Quorum in place, within 24 hours, all of the servers would have been out of sync. We would have lost the entire domain and have had to rebuild the domain servers from scratch. That would have taken weeks.

We had noticed the errors at around five o'clock in the afternoon and we decided to wait a little bit. Around six o'clock is when the server failed. By seven o'clock we were back up, everything was running, and we went home for the night.

When it comes to recovering what you need from a backup, it's super-easy. I give their dev team credit for making it super-simple. When we first started with them, it was a little on the clunky side. We were an early customer for them but they have upgraded it over time. I can open up a window share within three minutes and copy the files I need, if I just need specific files. In five minutes, I can have all the files I need for a specific day and go back as many days as I want. We store for 30 days so I can pull 30 days' worth of data. Six years ago that would have taken me about 10 to 15 minutes. It wasn't terrible. 

Now, if it was a restore of servers, that's a different story. If I had to take a server and completely do a bare-metal restore before, it was down a good 4 hours, maybe a little bit less. Now, it's 30 minutes. They really changed the way things go. 

From a disaster-recovery point of view, one of the things I really like is that I can test the virtual copy of the physical server on a test network and compare the servers side-by-side, without interfering with the production network. So I can see and make sure that the latest copy of the server is the physical copy of the server, without interfering with production.

Also, it automatically tests the copies of the servers for me. Whenever there's a copy of a server — bringing it over to the Quorum device to make a copy — it tests it and makes sure it will boot, that everything works fine, and then shuts it down. It sends me a notification saying "backup successful, test successful." I can choose a date that I want within the last 30 days, boot that server up on that specific day, and it will show me every file that was on there. So it does versioning. It will make the changes incrementally, so I can go through them by days. If there are any errors with a snapshot that has been created, I will get a notification and I can test it manually if I need to, or I can look into it why it failed. Maybe the server was in the middle of a reboot when it was trying to create it and created some errors. I can just create a new backup with one click. It sends it over to DR site and it's done.

We're protecting the data we currently have against failures, malware, or ransomware. We can do a one-click restore of files without losing them, so we don't have to pay ransom.

Also, all of the data is significantly compressed, so it does reduce data usage, but it's not something that we use to reduce our data usage.

One nice thing that they added is a single pane of glass to see all of your servers. You can see whether up, down, or transferring. That was a nice addition in version 5.

One thing that could be done to improve it would be a single pane of glass for doing disaster recovery testing, where I could have remote consoles in one place. They may be working towards this, and I haven't necessarily tested all of the features of version 5 yet. It is completely new to me. But as far as DR testing goes, I think I still have to go to each location in a browser and then bring up the console. I'd like to see them integrate that into a single pane of glass so I don't have to go to each server.

We are going on our sixth year using Quorum.

In six years, on the old hardware, I never had to replace the drive and the server never went down. Rarely did I have to do any software maintenance. Updates were done automatically on a device and whenever there was an update that required my intervention, Quorum contacted me and they were more than willing to just say, "Hey, do you want us to do this for you?" and they did most of the stuff on the back-end. I didn't have to do much of anything. 

You have to size it to what you think you're going to be doing. Cloud is different, if you're doing cloud, scalability is infinite. We do on-premise machines, so we scale slightly larger than what we need for future expansion. If we're doing a local branch, which are just file servers that do Active Directory, they're not anything special. But our operations center is backing up six to seven servers, so it's a little bit more beefy. We decided to go 64 cores, just to have that extra power.

Currently, we have everything backed up that we need backed up. Unless we're expecting additional servers to be added, which at the moment I don't think we are, for DR purposes it's exactly what we need.

As far as support goes, whenever I have had an actual problem with something — like one of the servers for some reason stopped transferring data from the HA device to the backup device itself — within a day, I had somebody from Quorum fixing the problem.

If I email tech support I get an email back within the hour, with a date and a time when they are next available. As soon as I agree to that, I have a schedule on my calendar for that specific date and time.

There are a couple of engineers that I talked to regularly because I actually got to know them for deployment. So when I called them, they picked up the phone. They knew it was me. You can create a rapport with them and they're all really nice guys. They're in California and Seattle and one guy I talked to is out of New York.

We were just using NAS devices to back up the data itself. If something were to happen, we would have to physically rebuild a server and import the data back into the server to be up and running.

We looked into Quorum for the ability to have a hot-standby server to power on. It was pretty enticing to not have to worry about rebuilding a server on the spot, if it failed. Being able to image the server back to the physical hardware was also enticing.

The initial setup was really straightforward. I received the servers and, in one day, I had the servers physically deployed to each location. Within two days, we had every server up and running and backing up its current node, and we do have a fairly high amount of bandwidth availability. We had finished with the servers on a Thursday and Friday. By Monday, all of them had sent all of their data to their DR systems. Everything was replicated.

In a matter of five days, we went from having the old system up and running, to dismantling the old system, bringing the new system online, and copying everything over.

When we talked about the deployment, there was a team of engineers I was working with. They took our previous environment — they had all of the information from that — and they sent me a document that I had to fill out, which was super-easy. I gave them a list of IP addresses that they needed. I gave them subnets, gateways, server names, and what I would like the onQ servers to be named. They reviewed that information and came back to me with some changes that they would like to see. We reviewed it and talked and, within a day or two, we had something set that we were going to deploy. Once we did that, they started the work on their end and when I got the servers, they were 90 percent configured.

There were two or three engineers I spoke with for implementation. Then I spoke with an engineer for deployment and another engineer for the miscellaneous odds and ends that we had to finish up with. They were all from Quorum. On our side, it was just me involved. 

As for the integration into our network, I didn't have to do anything. I plugged it in. I'm dead serious. I plugged it in and that's it. You can't get any better that that. Because I sent them all the information for IP addressing, subnetting, servers, set up, how many servers at each location, where the DRs were going to go, how they were going to transfer, it was all done on their test network. They plugged everything in and created all of the links to the devices and then they sent them to me.

Including the ordering of the servers, the whole process took about a month. Once they got the information from me, they had to order servers and receive them, install and configure the software, and get confirmation on where they were going to be shipped.

And I'm the only one involved in maintenance of the solution. I rarely have to do anything with these. They are incredibly low maintenance.

Having Quorum gives us 100 percent uptime. That would be the easiest way I can quantify it. If a server fails, we're still in business. Everything still runs as it should.

It's not possible to put an actual number or value on how much it's saved us. But to give you an idea, without that server — the one I told you about that went down — our lending department would not have been able to function and the branch would not have been able to function, so no transactions would have happened.

What I know is that it saves me headaches.

It depends on the scenario. Sometimes it might not be as impactful. It could be a hard drive failure in a RAID, which is not a big deal. One hard drive fails, you pop it out, pop a new one in, it's rebuilt. Operating system failures can be fixed, but it takes some time. If it's a catastrophic failure, that's where it really comes in handy because we have a copy of the server. We just boot it up, let it run, copy it over to a new server. Done.

If you were to go out and buy a server, you would not pay much more than what you would pay for the devices that they sold us. They took a massive discount off of these devices.

If I were to give you a quote on what the servers would cost, it might not be accurate across the board because each device is configured differently, depending on how much memory you need, how much hard drive space that you need, the processor size, and how many HA devices you're going to be putting on it. There are a lot of factors involved in pricing.

There is also a maintenance agreement for the software and updates. Those also vary in pricing, depending on how many protected nodes are going to be on it. Included in that is the support from Quorum, so if something goes wrong, you give them a call. You get somebody on the phone an hour or so later. You start a remote session and they log in and they take care of everything. It's really nice.

Think about your use case. If you need high-availability immediately, where you don't have to worry about routing and forwarding and transferring the information that you have locally to the cloud, that comes down to choosing cloud versus onsite/on-premise physical devices. 

Cloud is nice. You can route, although it does take a little bit more time, but you have no physical devices on-premise. There is higher bandwidth utilization when you're using cloud, versus on-premise, where you're using your local LAN and WAN. In the latter case, you have a little bit more flexibility.

The other thing I would recommend is making sure that you have enough bandwidth to transfer the data to your DR sites. When we first started, we had T1 lines and it was painful. It worked, but it was painful. Now with the increase in speed, with Metro Ethernets and high-speed fibre, you can do 150 MB or higher, it's really not a problem. Just make sure you have enough bandwidth to transfer the data.

It is a DR solution. It's there for the possibility of a disaster, so we don't have to pull our hair out and work 20-hour shifts just to get a server back up and running. We can actually relax, take our time, and do things right, rather than having to panic and do things in a rush.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using it is that, like with all hardware and software services, you do have to monitor it. It is there in the background doing its job and it does it well, but you have to make sure you're monitoring it, because if something does go wrong and that server fails, you still have the possibility of a failure. But it is good at what it does. It will backup servers, it will do its job well.

In terms of recovering a file or data that someone has overwritten or deleted by accident, that happens all the time. It's normal that someone loses a file. We have several other ways of restoring files so I don't use Quorum all the time. Sometimes I'll use Shadow Copy, because we take shadow copies. Sometimes I have Azure; sometimes I use Quorum. It all depends on how far back and how frequently they need that data. I use whichever one is easily available at the time I need it. Azure is a little bit more difficult than Quorum; it takes two to three minutes to get a file back with Azure. Usually, with Shadow Copy, you can right-click on the folder and you can restore right from that. But we can only go back a few weeks with that. Quorum goes back 30 days.

When you use Quorum, it will go to protected mode. You log in to your portal, go to restore, select files, go to the server, select the date, and then you start. It gives you a URL and you go to that URL and your Windows Explorer and it opens up a File Explorer for that specific time and you can browse the folders.

I have to rate Quorum at 10 out of 10. There's no doubt. It's solid. I don't have to worry at night. Even in the middle of night, if a server fails and I get a notification on my phone saying a server is down, I can log in, start a server, and have that branch operate. In the morning, they don't know that anything happened. It gives me peace of mind. I don't have to stress. There's enough stress in IT; I don't need more.

We're still old-school. We have a tape backup system that we use for the majority of our servers. onQ is kind of like doubling our protection. We like the fact that it's a complete disaster recovery solution, so if we ever lost a server, we could spin it up virtually and get our server repaired and nobody would miss any work or have even noticed a difference, other than possibly a little speed, and we're not even certain they would notice that. 

We also use it for general file recovery every once in a while when somebody deletes something they shouldn't have. We use that scenario as our test, every now and then, to go in and make sure we can still recover stuff. 

We use it for "insurance." We're in central Florida and in the Panhandle and it's a hurricane-prone area. We want to have things covered as much as possible, which is why we back up to the opposite office.

We have one in-house server in each of our two offices. The box in each office cross-replicates to the other. We try to put as little in the cloud as possible. We are slowly moving some things to the cloud, but as far as company data goes, we really want to manage that in-house as long as possible.

We had an instance a few years ago where we lost one of the cards for the RAID controller on one of our servers. When they put the replacement parts back in it didn't recognize our RAID at all. We had to redo the RAID and then we did a complete restore off of the onQ's and it took about three hours. Our server was back exactly where it was the day before and there was very minimal downtime as far as that kind of endeavor is concerned. It worked flawlessly. We've never actually had to do it off of the tape system, but I would think it would be exceptionally tedious because it would take at least the better part of the day to set the server up. And then you would have to worry about copying the directories and making sure you got everything. To recover all the user accounts and system accounts, it would get complicated fairly quickly.

At that time, with Backup Exec, which is made for the tape backup systems by a competitor, I don't even know if you could completely back up the entire volume. You could do the files, but I'm not sure it would do the operating system. The newer versions of software claim they can, but it's still a little bit of a crapshoot as to whether it really recovers the whole system. If it doesn't, then you have to set the server up, re-install the software, and then try and copy your files back. It would be pretty ugly.

Mostly, onQ gives us confidence, knowing that we're really covered if we really have to bring the systems up. It's a complete solution, whereas tape backups, in some of those situations, are not designed to actually spin the system up. They're designed to, at best, copy it to another machine and hope it works. It's comparing apples and oranges. onQ really is a complete system that you can bring up in an emergency. Instead of being down for a couple of hours, you're down for a matter of minutes in a lot of cases.

In terms of recovering a file or data that somebody has overwritten or deleted, we usually get an email or somebody comes by and says, "Oops, I accidentally deleted something from my user folder or out of a directory. Can you get it back?" Generally, we prefer to use the Quorums if we can because they're a lot quicker than the tape backup system. We can drill through a directory pretty quickly and select the location. Backup Exec does very similar things but it's a little bit slower. And we have two different sets of tape. So if it's on another set of tapes, then we might have to physically switch the tapes out, which takes even longer. We don't have that issue with the onQ's, because we keep roughly 40 days of backups for our entire company on there.

When it comes to recovering what you need from a backup, it's really easy. You just drill through the directory, find the file and the date that you want, and click to recover. You then pick the directory you want to save it in. Usually, it takes a minute or two and it's done. It's quick and easy.

One of the other capabilities of these systems, which is really a huge thing to us, is that it does bare-metal restores if you need to. If you had to completely recover a system from tape, if it did work — which I'd be somewhat skeptical about — it would take a long time.

onQ is also pretty good at notifications. We get a report every day, and weekly, regarding the backups and the status of the backups.

It does automated tests to the systems to make sure that you can spin them up if you need to. And if something doesn't come back up in those tests, we get a notification saying the system didn't come back up. You can go in and find out why it didn't. In most cases, it's a timeout issue where the system just didn't give it long enough to actually come up. If we go in ourselves and test it and watch it for a little while, it will do it. Sometimes there's a driver issue because the onQ's may not have every hardware driver on the onQ system itself, to spin the box up. So it will spin up and say it's got a driver issue. You can go online, it'll download the driver, and then you can reboot it.

We've worked with Quorum a couple of times to go in and look at why a system didn't pass the test successfully and they've had to go in and modify a couple of the settings for some of the drivers that it copies. It's happened maybe twice and they're very responsive to doing that kind of stuff.

It does everything automatically by itself. We just sit back and watch the emails for the most part.

There's not much room for improvement in onQ. The systems are pretty stable. Their support is top-notch. I like the fact that their support seems to be in North America solely, so there aren't any language issues. I really don't have any complaints.

The one thing they could do is some tweaking on the web solution that's supposed to monitor everything from one page, rather than having to bring each server up on its own webpage. It doesn't always accurately show what the system's state is at the time, and we have to restart that process now and then. But it's not really affecting productivity. It just would make our monitoring slightly easier.

We've been using onQ since 2012. We're on our second set of disaster recovery boxes. We just replaced them earlier this year.

Our onQ's are very stable. We very rarely have to reboot them. We don't have any real configuration issues or issues communicating with them. Any of the issues we've had have usually been a result of something on our end, such as network problems or something dropping between the two offices, which had nothing to do with their systems.

The scalability is very good. We bought ours big enough so that we could add another server if we needed to. But we never did max out even the old ones by the time we were done with them. And we ran them for seven years. We've had no issues with scalability. We never outgrew them or ran into storage space issues. 

I believe the maximum they recommend is about 40 days, but whatever their default was is what we left it at. We could probably even increase that some if we wanted to and not have any major problems, but we haven't had any need to.

The only way we would be able to increase the usage would be to add more servers. They're doing exactly what they were designed to do, which is give us an assurance that, should we lose one of our production servers, we can spin it up on the onQ's within a matter of minutes and keep working.

Quorum's support, compared to any of the people we've dealt with, which has primarily been Symantec, is far superior.

Their support agents are very efficient, for the most part. They can usually resolve things. A couple of times we've had things that an engineer needed to look at. That was a case where our network connection between the two offices dropped, due to nothing related to Quorum. They had to go in and do a little bit of cleanup, get the files cleared out so it could do a proper backup. But that's happened maybe once or twice in seven years. Overall, they do what they say they do and they do it very well.

When you buy the server it comes with three years of support and, after that, you have to do a renewal process. But it's the standard support that comes with the system. When you buy it, you can pick which support level you want. You can get it five days a week during business hours, seven days a week during business hours, or 24/7. It all depends on what you need. We have the five-day, business-hours support but it's worked very well for us.

We were using Symantec prior to Quorum and we still have it because the system is still running. We keep a support contract with them. Our tape library is so large that we can hold six months' worth of backups. That gives us an extended range if we really needed to get some old data off of there. But generally, we go to the quorum first because it is just a lot simpler to use.

What prompted us to look into getting another solution was beefing up our disaster recovery plans, because of things like the hurricanes that we have. Ten or 15 years ago you'd get one hurricane every five or 10 years. Now we're getting to the point, with whatever's happening in the environment, that we have hurricanes two or three times a year. The onQ's are an "insurance policy" that if something fails, we've got a pretty complete system that we can bring online in a short amount of time. Or if we had to replace the hardware, we could copy everything back onto a new piece of equipment and it would work. It allows us to sleep at night.

The initial setup was easy. They helped us. All we had to do was install the boxes. Once we installed the boxes, they connected remotely and helped set everything up. We installed the client on the servers that needed to have them and they configured things and made sure everything was running with a little bit of testing. Then they let us go. They checked back a week or two later just to see how things were going. But we've had so few issues that it's pretty infrequent that we have to talk to these guys.

The integration process with our organization's network was easy and seamless. There was very little impact. The only thing we had to do is because we have an internet connection to our sister office, an MPLS network. At one point we had to increase our bandwidth. At certain times of the day — although we tried to do it just at night — if there was a large amount of data to replicate, then it would still be running the next morning. And that impacted things to a slight degree. After upping our bandwidth we had no issues at all.

The deployment of our newest boxes took two-thirds of a day or so. The biggest problem was my getting the other box up to Tallahassee. We could have had it shipped, but we don't have any IT in that other office, so one of us had to go up there. So the delay was really on our end because I had to get the hardware up there and install it. We spent two or three hours in the Orlando office setting all that up and then another two or three hours in our Tallahassee office setting up the other box. Altogether, it was definitely less than a day.

Quorum maps out the implementation plan for you. They do some research in the beginning, before the box is ever shipped. They needed an IP range for five or six IP addresses. We sent that to them and they labeled what was going to be the interface for each office. They've got it down to a pretty streamlined process where there's really not a lot of lag time or any mysterious questions.

It takes one person, from our side, for deployment. We have a staff of two people in our IT department. The other person I work with stayed here while I was in the other office setting it up. Since we're the only people in the IT department, nobody else would be going in and using it.

In terms of maintenance, there really is none on the Quorum boxes. They push out updates every once in a while. Generally, they contact us and say, "Hey, we have a couple of updates to put on there." It's usually 30 minutes every now and then. I wouldn't even say that happens on a regular basis. They've done their homework and their hardware works pretty dependably.

In terms of capital expenditure, the main thing the solution has done is to allow us to really utilize our hardware to the maximum. Money is always an issue for a company of our size, and we don't always have the capital to replace servers on a regular basis. This gives us the ability, technically, to run servers until they just stop running, if we really want to. We're in that scenario now where we've got a system that still runs, but we have to replace the hardware because the operating system is no longer supported. onQ has allowed us to get every bit of life out of a server, which does lower our bottom-line.

It has saved us $40,000 or so, the cost of two or three servers. It has allowed us to run two or three servers a lot longer than we normally would have. Sometimes, we're getting another year or two out of them.

I wouldn't look at it as a return on investment, any more than you would look at the return on investment for an insurance policy. It's there if you need it and you hope you don't have to use it. In the meantime, we use it for some basic file recovery and some other things, plus it helps us meet some of our HIPAA compliance issues in terms of being able to recover, and as part of our disaster plan. There's value there, but I'm not a bean-counter so it's hard to put a dollar amount to it without doing a lot of analyzing.

The initial expenditure for us was a little under $40,000 for the recent renewal. For the first three years after that, other than electricity, there's no cost. After that, their support contract has to be renewed annually. We spent close to $6,000, between the two offices, for support. That's not a big deal when you're pretty much guaranteed that you're going to be able to recover in an emergency situation. That's well worth it.

I think they're really reasonable. If you price out servers like the ones they put in here, and even if you were to put it in your own system — without figuring out the software and all of the logistics of doing that — it would cost you almost as much just to buy the hardware. Microsoft licensing is very expensive and, if you're going to do anything on your own, you've got to have a team of developers. That's just not something we're in the business of doing with a small IT department. We don't have time to do stuff like that.

We didn't evaluate other solutions. A colleague of mine and I went to a lunch, to one of Quorum's seminars one day, and we were very impressed with the presentation. Everything they said made sense and we didn't really see any need to look any further. And we still don't or we wouldn't have bought another set of them.

Symantec is slow, at least for our solution. I'm sure they have cloud backups but, as I said, our resistance to putting any more in the cloud than we have to is pretty high. We're really trying to keep things in-house. And without spending a ton on hardware, tape is just slower. 

It was a cost thing primarily, but also speed. Personally, and not to bad-mouth competitors, Symantec's support is very difficult to navigate and to get any real attention from on a lot of issues, and that definitely doesn't happen in a timely manner. We don't have that problem with Quorum. They're very responsive.

Check out the competitors. I was so impressed with Quorum that we haven't checked out anybody else. We just wanted to stay with them. We have a good relationship with them. But do your homework and have them really demonstrate what it can do for you. I think you will be just as impressed.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using onQ is that it's a system that works. We've lost a server and done a complete recovery in a matter of hours. That's really all the convincing we needed, to know that the system works. If needed, it does what they say it will do. It did it flawlessly. There was no, "Oh, we're going to have to tweak this" or, "Oh, we're going to have to do that." When we lost that server, as soon as we got it up and running, they were on the phone. They guided us through the few things we needed to do. The whole thing was just a matter of hours to have it back up and running. It doesn't get any better than that, to me.

The solution hasn't affected our overall storage efficiency. It doesn't impact anything on the servers. It's a small footprint and runs in conjunction with our Backup Exec. They don't seem to step on each other, so it doesn't cost us any additional time. It just does its thing on its own without any interference. It's pretty slick.

They're always coming up with new stuff, but we haven't really looked into everything. Our needs are pretty simple. Things change very slowly in our company so we're not really looking to expand anything right now. But if they had other products, we'd probably look at them.

The solution is a 10 out of 10. It's well-designed. It does what they say it'll do and they back up what they say. They help you if you need it. I wouldn't change anything. We're really pleased with them. They're a great company and anytime we've needed help they've been there. They have jumped right into it.

The primary use case for us is a high-availability. The ease of use is a part of that as well. The ability to spin up a backed-up VM or to put it on the production network, literally in a matter of minutes, if a VM goes down, is critical for us.

If a VM goes down for whatever reason — having that assurance that we've got a reliable backed up VM on a separate platform that we can spin up on a different piece of hardware and appliance in real-time, and get the resource back up and running again quickly, is the best use case for us.

One of the benefits of the onQ platform is that it does what it does, and it does it well. It's very easy to keep up and running. In terms of day-to-day management, once you have everything in place, it does its job and takes the snapshots for you and gives you the reporting back on them. From a solution standpoint, it works very well.

Being able to spin up another VM on the appliance, in production mode, within a matter of a couple of minutes, has been immensely helpful. Having the ability to reduce recovery time, for critical resources, from multiple hours to a matter of minutes, is huge.

It's easy to manage. We're a smaller team.  It's easy to implement, easy to spin up, easily configurable, to drop-in appliances and network. There wasn't a lot of time needed to spin it up. 

From a day-to-day management perspective, it's very easy to use as well.

And I get reporting on the latest backup every day, whether or not it was successful, and whether or not the test of the VM was successful. It comes to me by email and gives me the status of each of the VMs: When it was last backed up, whether or not the backup was successful, and whether or not the test was successful. 

Upgrading the software on the appliance feels to me like it's going to be a little bit more work than I originally anticipated.

The process for moving the VM off of the Quorum appliance and back into the production network again requires quite a number of steps. I don't know if there can be any improvement made on that, but in looking at it, I found it was pretty lengthy. There were quite a number of steps there so I requested that one of the Quorum engineers perform the process, which they were happy to do. That part was great. They were able to get that VM moved over from the appliance to my production network again and everything was fine.

We've been using onQ since 2015. 

The stability has been great. The appliance has been rock-solid. I've had no issues with the hardware. We've had the same appliance for the last four years now and it has been running great. It requires very little management time, if any. It just runs and works.

The scalability is  good, from what I remember. We haven't scaled up a ton. The capacity planning that was done originally, with the estimated growth that we put in for headroom, for expansion and growth, was accurate. We've been able to grow into the solution without making any changes or any adjustments. Scalability was planned out at the beginning. I've been in great shape there.

One of the things that I like about Quorum is the level of support. 

Overall, their support folks are great. They have proactively reached out to me when they've noticed issues with the backup not taking for a few days, or outside of a threshold, or if they've seen any issue where a VM has not been successful in testing over the last couple of days. They'll proactively reach out to me.

I've had cases where I actually shut down a VM from production because I didn't need it anymore but forgot about the Quorum appliance trying to take snapshots of it. It kept failing and I just ignored it on the report because I knew about it. But the Quorum support folks didn't know that that's what happened. They were a little concerned that the device hadn't backed up in X amount of days. They actually reached out to me and said, "Hey, we saw that your VM X-Y-Z hasn't been backed up. What's going on with that? Do you need help?" That was impressive. It feels like they've got my back as well. It's not just me who has visibility or eyes on the backups. I'm getting a little assistance from their NOC or support team which, in some cases, keeps track of the statuses of those backups too.

We had a solution, but it was a very manual, labor-intensive, not-full-VM appliance. 

For us, partnering with an organization like Quorum, a company that basically hands it to you in a box and it's all ready to go and implement quickly and easily, without a lot of management resource on my end to keep the thing running — it just does what it's supposed to do — is the best approach at this point.

The initial setup was relatively straight forward. That was one of the selling points of Quorum with the appliance device. I did some due diligence and figured out sizing capacity, so they could size the appliance correctly. They had me run some tools for capacity-planning in my environment. They took all that information and they came up with the right size solution for the appliance that I needed.

To provision the appliance, they had me drop it into my network and spin it up, which is very easy to do. Once they had connectivity to it we finished the configuration on it. They then gave me the ability to manage the appliance and start getting backups from my VM environment onto it. 

So the implementation rollout was a very easy, handheld process. They did a lot of handholding and it was very white-glove. It was very easy, which was great.

I worked with one or two of their engineers.

We haven't really fully measured ROI.  I definitely believe there has been ROI.

The solution can be on the pricier side depending on options selected but it's one of those situations where if time is valuable and resources are limited, it might be worth it.  Each use case is unique.

We evaluated a couple of other players, including Datto. Ease of use was one of the differences between Quorum and Datto. I think there were some problems with Datto, as I remember. I did a lot of research on forums and sites, like ITCentralStation.com, from an end-user perspective in different environments. That gave me an idea as to what the solution was like after it was implemented, installed, and up and running. I really relied on what the community was saying about the different solutions. Each one has its pros and cons.

For our organization, after reading all the reviews and commentary, and taking into consideration points that mattered to us, it really came down to Quorum, from many different angles, being the front-runner.

Look at all the partners out there and pick the one that you feel is the best fit for you, based on your use case. Everyone is a little bit different and has different needs in terms of what's critical to them and what's not important.

I give Quorum a solid nine out of 10. Over a number of years it has been a rock-solid solution. It has worked for us. It's easy to manage. It doesn't take a lot of my time. It does what it needs to do. When I have had to use it and rely upon it, it has been there.

The onsite version keeps our backups for all of our NOC servers, which is everything operational. We get backups every four hours or so, and should something happen — someone deletes something or a server's hardware goes out — we're able to restore that locally, very quickly. The Quorum will run a virtual machine, the recovery node of the server, from the latest backup, within minutes of having an issue.

Our deployment of the solution is both on-prem and cloud. We're only sending a few specific servers to the Quorum cloud, which hosted by them. We have our onsite device as well which backs everything up.

We had a few instances where someone who had access to some accounting shares got infected and no one could access those files. We were able to lock down the infection on that person's computer and, within an hour of it being detected, restore files to four hours prior, when there was no infection. So we were only set back on a few files by a few hours instead of a day or two.

We've also had hardware failures on physical servers. We were able to restore the recovery node and bring the server back up, with the users unaware that there was ever a problem, other than losing connection briefly while the recovery node came online. There may have only been a few hours lost instead of a day, where we had to fix the physical server and then bring it online.

With the restore function on the Quorum, we're able to go down to the individual file level for each backup, and we have 40 or 60 backups available. We are able to restore the files to exactly where they were, through Quorum's interface. It's very easy to go through if you've ever used a file system as a system administrator. It is very intuitive to navigate and recover the files to exactly where they were when they were backed up.

The biggest feature is being able to do a file recovery to the original server. That is extremely useful and has saved us a few times when we've had ransomware. In some of those cases, people's computers were locked down by viruses which spread to things they had access to, including server shares. But we were easily able to just restore to four hours prior, instead of a day or two or more ago. That has been extremely useful.

And being able to bring a server up from the same backup from a few hours ago, if the server were to crash or have issues, is valuable.

When it comes to recovering what we need from a backup, it's very easy to use. The interface is very straightforward in getting to your goal. It has made file recovery very easy, very simple, and quick.

Also, the automated testing functionality seems accurate. If it comes back and says there's a problem, I can always contact support and usually it's just that there is a little hiccup. They run a few commands and resolve any automatic report issues. In our case, we have some older servers which don't necessarily report correctly even though their recovery nodes will power on.

We've been using Quorum for at least six years. The company had it before I started working here.

Quorum is very stable. We've had a few hiccups over the years, but they weren't anything that Quorum didn't quickly support us on, or replace any hard drives that may have been awry.

It seems to scale very easily, as long as you have the hard drive space.

We currently have 12 servers that are being backed up every four hours. That includes SQL servers, an Exchange Server, database servers, and domain controllers.

Quorum support is very good. They have very knowledgeable technicians who are more than happy to guide you through any process that you're trying to accomplish. The tech support agents are very efficient. Eighty percent of the time that I contact Quorum, my issue is resolved within 15 to 20 minutes.

However, there seems to be a lack of technicians. Sometimes they are very busy and I don't hear back for a day or two. The technicians they have are great. They are fantastic, but it seems difficult, at times, to get in contact with anyone.

We have had them actually put us at the front of the line when it has been a critical emergency.

It was very easy to integrate and configure and set up. It's straightforward. Having had the process explained to me the first time, I have been able to manage the system on my own ever since.

The deployment took a day.

The implementation plan was to get the device plugged in and turned on. The Quorum technician would then connect and help with any final configuration. We had already had a few configuration talks beforehand regarding what was required with the device we bought. Then we just needed to start the backups on each of our servers.

The solution is definitely an extra cost, but it's an extra cost that's worth it because of what it offers. It's not a necessary expense, as I could do similar things with a hard drive that was getting backed up to every night, but having Quorum, I can now recover every few hours instead of every few day and I can get immediate recovery on servers that have critical failures. It has proven its worth and its cost, but it is an extra cost that isn't strictly required.

The ease of recovering from data loss is huge, as well as the peace of mind, knowing that if something does happen, I can have a replacement running in a matter of minutes.

The total for our current solution's licensing is about $14,000 for 12 servers for three years. We bought hardware from Quorum which was part of the total. We paid upfront to get a discount.

We had just started using it when I was hired on, and I was just a helpdesk technician at the time. I was taught how to use it, but wasn't heavily involved in the process until a few years in. Earlier this year we did look at at least one other viable solution. After doing some cost analysis of both the other solution and Quorum, Quorum came out much cheaper, and we got way more for the money we were spending.

My advice would be to make sure you leave your protected node configuration with plenty of extra hard drive space.

Everything has functioned the way we've needed it to. They're in a transition phase now with a new interface and this new architecture, so I'm withholding judgment for the most part on that, as they are still figuring things out.

We have three users, whose roles are server administration and our CIO, but it's mostly me as server administrator. The solution requires one person for deployment and maintenance of the solution.

This solution provides us with business continuity. It is far more than just a DR, or backup solution. It keeps our business up and running with redundant backups of business-critical systems and files that would shut us down if lost. I would suggest this product over all others.

This is true peace of mind for all IT admins. OnQ works, simple as that. This is also the first and only company that has reached out to me because they saw issues before we did. That proactive approach is absolutely invaluable, is another reason why I suggest this product to anyone I talk to.

Being able to spin up a machine in a sandbox is amazing because it allows us to test things that we otherwise would not be able to do.

The self-test feature isn't anything new, but to not have that functionality these days should be a deal-breaker for any company looking for a solution.

At times the email notifications don't go out, but a quick reset always fixes that problem.

I have been using this solution for six years.

Stability is very good, with a couple of non-critical features needing resets once in a while.

This solution is easily scalable.

Amazing throughout the last six years. A lot of companies get too big too fast and can't keep up with the support calls but that has never happened.

I have used many different solutions and at the time, none of them came even close to what OnQ provided. They were ahead of the game, everyone else had to catch up after going public with this product.

The initial setup is easy and straightforward, very seamless.

The level of expertise is ten out of ten.

With regard to ROI, it is invaluable.

The cost is higher than other software and services, but it is an absolute must-have. It pays for itself daily, even if you never have a disaster (knock on wood).

We looked at Veeam, Unitrends, Datto, and Dell.

It's hard to say where this product needs improvement, as we have not had any problems or needs other than what is already provided, and we are more than happy with the value we are getting out of OnQ.