QoreStor Reviews

My main use case for QoreStor is the deduplication and compression, primarily. It deduplicates and compresses everything before it hits the disk. What would take up 100 terabytes of raw storage ends up using maybe five or six terabytes in practice.

Deduplication is the obvious feature, and it really is as good as advertised in QoreStor. We're consistently seeing a 65 to 75% reduction on disk.

Besides deduplication, the hardware flexibility is a particularly valuable feature in QoreStor that is underrated. It runs on pretty much any hardware, including virtual machines, which meant we didn't have to buy a dedicated appliance.

QoreStor has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to go from backing up roughly 120 terabytes that was consuming terabytes of storage down to using around 8 terabytes with deduplication and compression.

The air gap feature is something I'd really like to see in QoreStor. There's no native air gap capability right now, and for security-conscious environments, that's a gap.

The configuration export is also limited in QoreStor. If you want to document your setup or migrate configuration to a new instance, it requires more manual work than it should.

I have been using QoreStor for three years.

QoreStor scales reasonably well. The software-defined approach means you can add capacity by adding hardware rather than replacing an appliance, which is flexible.

Before QoreStor, we were backing up around 120 terabytes of data, and it was consuming close to 90 terabytes of physical storage. That was just raw backup data sitting on disk taking up space and costing money.

Before QoreStor, I previously used tape backups and raw disk storage. Tape was reliable but slow, and the management overhead was significant, with someone physically swapping tapes or site rotation.

We had good support during the initial setup of QoreStor.

The consultant from Quest was genuinely helpful and walked us through everything properly.

Before choosing QoreStor, I evaluated other options such as Dell EMC Data Domain and VMware with their native deduplication. Data Domain is the gold standard in the space, but the cost is significantly higher, and it ties you to specific hardware.

My advice to others looking into using QoreStor is to make sure you're clear on what backup software you're using and verify compatibility before you commit.

If storage costs are a problem, whether on-premises or cloud, QoreStor is worth a serious look. The deduplication ratios we've achieved have been better than we honestly expected going in. I would rate this product a 7 out of 10.

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.

This software solution can be installed on many different types of hardware, which makes it very flexible. We can run it on virtual machines or virtual servers, providing convenience for solutions of varying sizes, from small to large. This flexibility contributes to it being easy to install. It makes it easy to engineer solutions for customers.

They could improve on support a little bit. We have not had to engage their support much, but when we do have issues, it can take longer to get things resolved. We are pretty lenient as we do a lot of IT support ourselves. We are not very hard on support organizations, but when a customer has a support issue, it would be easier if the support processes were a little bit more automated. It would be beneficial to have an easier way to upload diagnostic dump files. They can make it easy for the customer to collect the diagnostic data.

There can be some kind of monitoring solutions to alert users to issues with the appliance or software, making it easy for customers to monitor their systems in the field. This is especially critical because it stores customers' backups, and a failure can have significant business impacts. If a customer does not have the backups and has a disaster, they can be out of business, so monitoring is key.

Our usage of the solution has been ongoing for about seven years.

There is no lagging, crashing, or downtime. The system has been very stable.

The system is highly scalable. You can start small and scale to large systems. This scalability makes the cost manageable because it allows for absorbing costs over time, keeping it reasonable. It is very scalable and at a reasonable cost and price point as you scale.

They could improve support processes, perhaps making them more automated. 

Once you get an engineer on the phone, they are very well-versed in the product and can usually solve problems quickly within a day unless the problem is very complex. Initially, we had more problems with the product, but its quality has consistently improved over the years. We now have minimal issues that require us to call support.

Positive

We have used HPE StoreOnce and Data Domain, which is an EMC product now owned by Dell. The main difference is that QoreStor provides a lot more value at a lower cost. It is a lower-cost solution. It provides many of the same features. HPE StoreOnce and Data Domain solutions tend to be expensive and are hardware-based, leading to more vendor lock-in compared to QoreStor. You have to buy Dell or HPE hardware to implement those solutions. They have much more vendor lock-in from a hardware standpoint than QoreStor does.

It is mostly on-premises, although I do know of ways where you can implement it in the cloud if you need it.

It is easy to deploy. The initial setup is easy. It usually takes a single day to fully deploy it to a working condition.

It requires at least yearly maintenance. It requires software updates and checking the hardware that it is running on to ensure that it is healthy. That can be accomplished once or twice per year, and, usually, that is acceptable.

One engineer is required for this process.

The pricing is good. It is competitive for a managed services provider. I like the ability to pay by the terabyte, allowing for an incremental cost that we and our customers can afford, so the solution grows with the customer. For example, I can buy a server to install QoreStor on, but I do not have to license the entire server immediately. I can license it as I grow, and as I add more data, I can increase my Quest QoreStor license. That is very helpful for a lot of customers. It helps to sell the solution because the cost of acquisition of the solution is lower, at least at the beginning. As the customer owns the solution year over year and it grows, their costs may go up year over year, but it is manageable. It is much more manageable than a very large purchase where you have to make a large upfront cost commitment.

New users should use a supported configuration for their appliance for installing the software. Work with a certified installer for the software so that it is installed properly and you get the proper support. You can consider buying an appliance that is preinstalled by a certified Quest QoreStor provider, like us at EDSI. It will make the long-term support of the product and reliability much more successful.

I would rate QoreStor a ten out of ten for what it offers for the price. It is a great product. There are a lot of features for a customer or an IT managed services provider to work with. Quest makes it very easy to work with them. Their representatives provide great customer support to us as a managed services provider. That is why I would rate the product as a ten out of ten.

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.

Overall, I am happy with this solution, but a way to export configuration settings would be beneficial. After everything is set up and configured, there should be a way to export the configuration. In case something happens to the QoreStor server, and we need to reinstall and configure everything, being able to import the configuration would be helpful. This feature does not currently exist.

We have been using it for six months.

Quest QoreStor is very stable compared to our previous solution. It has not crashed at all. Any issues are related to our hardware and not Quest.

Increasing capacity should not be a problem. If we need more space, we will purchase additional disks and an additional license for that space.

We had some issues with the storage device that we set up, and they were very helpful regarding that. The problem was related to Lenovo, not Quest, but their support helped us all the way.

Their speed has been good compared to others. We always get the automated message back. I have contacted them about three times, and generally, I receive a response on the same day I post the support case.

I would rate their support a ten out of ten. I am very happy with the help I got from them.

Positive

I have not personally used anything similar before Quest QoreStor, as I did not work in backup roles in previous companies.

We installed it in our data center on-premises on a physical server, separate from the environment that we are taking backups of. We bought a new physical server to only run QoreStor. I know you can run it on a virtual server in the same environment, but we wanted it separate.

The initial setup was easy because we had good help from a consultant from Quest. We were in contact with him through Teams chat, and we had a meeting scheduled for a Saturday when he helped us install this. I documented every step. In total, it took two to three hours.

It does not require any maintenance from our side. Everything is up and running all the time. It works very well.

A consultant from Quest assisted us during the setup. From our side, there were two people, but the other person was a new guy, so I had him along. Generally, one person is enough.

Quest QoreStor's pricing is affordable. We evaluated Veeam, a well-known company for backup solutions, but found their pricing to be quite high. Veeam's price was almost double. For us, Quest QoreStor is very affordable. 

We pay based on the amount of storage we use, but this is something they can make easier. It is hard to calculate the amount of data you need. Especially if you are paying for three years, it is hard to know. We have calculated about a 10% increase.

You need some familiarity with Linux as the system operates on it. There was a big learning curve for me when it came to that. Quest provided help with commands, but understanding Linux basics beforehand is useful. 

I would rate Quest QoreStor a ten out of ten. I am very happy with it so far.

We use Quest QoreStor for an inline data application and compression for our backup server.

Quest QoreStor allows you to use cold storage for long-term data retention.

We use Quest QoreStor for both on-premises and cloud operations, and we are definitely seeing significant cost savings. We were just uploading to the cloud before, and now we are running it through Quest QoreStor. The license cost is actually lower than what we would pay extra in storage space.

Deduplication and compression are the main features that make someone get Quest QoreStor, and that's where it really shines. I use ZFS and XFS at home, and Quest QoreStor is even better.

With Quest QoreStor, you only pay for the hardware and the software, and if you want to achieve a shorter cost reduction.

Quest QoreStor definitely saved us money. We use it for deduplication and compression, and everything that we don't offload onto the cloud saves us money. We only upload the changed blocks, and we save on our cloud fee, such as the cloud invoice for backup storage.

The importance of support is significant to me. I was working for a service provider, and all of our customers had a Quest or warning. Sometimes the support really underperforms. I always had to get it escalated or ask for someone specifically because those other people would just read knowledge-based articles that I had already done myself.

Quest QoreStor does not work with any backup software, server, or storage hardware. It has the hardware compatibility list, and you need a specific number of IOPS, so it needs to run on decent hardware at least to have enough input-output operations. Otherwise, the setup result will be canceled. I'm not too sure if there are still physical appliances, but when I first started, we had some customers with a physical Quest QoreStor appliance, and it would only run on certain hardware. It doesn't work with every backup program. For example, Veritas Backup Exec is incompatible, but Veeam is compatible, and V Ranger is compatible as well.

I didn't even know that Quest QoreStor has any static AI and behavioral AI technologies.

I was first introduced to Quest QoreStor and other Quest products during my IT training five years ago, and I've been using it ever since.

The support team consists of three or five people, with three very good people and two people who are not helpful. I always had to get it escalated or ask for someone specifically because those other people would just read knowledge-based articles that I had already done myself.

Neutral

I have used HPE StoreOnce with deduplication and compression as an alternative to Quest QoreStor.

The deployment of Quest QoreStor is flawless. It's very easy. You do it once for every customer, and just click it and forget it.

One person can deploy Quest QoreStor. Technically, in a larger environment, you would do it with your team. However, I don't see Quest QoreStor as a big enterprise product. It's more suitable for small businesses.

With Quest QoreStor, you only pay for the hardware and the software, and if you want to achieve a shorter cost reduction.

These products aren't comparable. Veeam is basically the software that provides the backup, and Quest QoreStor is the underlying storage.

I am not too sure about the archiving feature. It has that capability, but I'm not too sure if it's categorized as archiving as per German or European law. We need something revised in a safe backup so it can be held up in court.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Quest QoreStor a seven out of 10.

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.

I would say that the ransomware protection of QoreStor could use improvement because it's based in the Linux operating system, and it's more difficult to detect ransomware attacks.

It's a very reliable and stable solution.

When it comes to the scalability of QoreStore, I have not had the chance to test it much. It does not require a lot of maintenance at all.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten. 

The initial setup is a little complex, but it can easily be set up if you follow the instructions.

There are many benefits to using QoreStor. Customers agree that it increases their protection and provides file backup within the same storage. Based on that, there is a possibility of avoiding additional investment.

QoreStor's vendors should explain the usage and storage of the solution to customers in detail in order to maximize its usage.

Overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten. Issues with QoreStor occur only when there is a power outage. Other than that, it works perfectly.

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.

Data deduplication and replication would be the top two features. The encryption and cloud tiering are also attractive for the future.

Its one price is also interesting for us and our customers. You have one price, and you get everything from QoreStor.

It provides archiving capabilities, and you can archive to the cloud.

It is a software, so there is more flexibility. It can run on different hardware and is hardware-independent. The fact that it is a software was interesting for us because we also offer the appliance for IBM i and HP NonStop. For IBM i, we have an appliance that we offer with our box. For HP NonStop, it is integrated with our box. So, a customer buys a server based on the configuration that we recommend. We then install our software, and QoreStor runs underneath in the VM environment. So, it's all in the same physical box. For the NonStop market, we went further and used the QoreStor API. So, we are able to configure QoreStor from our software called BackBox. BackBox interfaces with NonStop, and we are controlling the QoreStor behind BackBox.

They need to increase their maximum capacity. Other than that, they're doing a pretty good job.

We've been involved with QoreStor for around two and a half years. 

It is very good. There were only a few occasions where we had to deal with QoreStor to fix an issue.

It is good in terms of scalability, but the maximum capacity can be reached very quickly. That's why I'm expecting that the maximum capacity would increase in the future, but for now, we are good. 

We are basically starting to market that product, and internally, we don't have a huge backup, so we are good for now. In the future, we may have a situation where the maximum capacity might be an issue, and that's probably the thing that Quest needs to improve in the future.

Their technical support is very good. We were in a good position to test their support because we started to work with QoreStor from day one of the announcement. We work very closely with Quest support. During Quest adoption, when we found some mistakes and we were missing a feature, they were actually pretty quick to provide that feature to us.

We were using HP StoreOnce. We chose QoreStor to integrate it with our product. The main difference is that QoreStor is a software, so we can put it on the same hardware as our solution. If customers want to use HP StoreOnce with HP NonStop, they can still use it, but QoreStor is the only one that is fully integrated with our solution and support. Since we started to resell QoreStor, we have been using it internally.

It's better than other backup solutions we have used or evaluated. The dedupe rate is good. We see a 20 times dedupe rate. Its replication efficiency is great. The big difference is that you get everything at one price. With other solutions, you get two times cloud storage of the license, whereas, with QoreStor, it is three times. So, if you have 100 terabytes, with other solutions, you will have an additional 200 terabytes in a cloud with the same license, whereas with QoreStor, you will have 300 terabytes.

Its initial setup is straightforward. It is very simple in terms of implementation. Its UI is very good, and it is fairly easy to do the configuration. 

We have integrated it with our box and we have our UI, which has increased automation in the installation and made it even easier.

I don't have numbers, but the return on investment is the deduplication and all other things it does. QoreStor is quite interesting.

Its pricing model is very attractive. You have one price, and you get everything from QoreStor.

My advice for people who would like to buy QoreStor is they can look at the price model. It is hardware-independent, so it is not like an appliance where you shop for the specific hardware. In our case, when we deal with HP, HP can run QoreStor on their platform or server. So, the pricing is focused on the software, and it includes everything.

We internally don't use cloud storage for long-term data retention. We only use it for testing. The cloud is a value-add for now, and it is an interesting feature that we expect our customers to look into in the future. Similarly, its Object Direct feature allows you to move an object directly to the cloud without having to de-hydrade and re-hydrade the backups, but we haven't really started to use it for our backup. We only use it for testing internally. We expect that customers will start to look into this feature. The reason why it's so important is that you save a lot of space in the cloud when you just move the dedupe object to the cloud.

In terms of whether QoreStor has reduced our backup storage requirements, it certainly did significantly reduce our storage needs. For customers, we can offer up to the maximum of what QoreStor is capable of. It is around 300 terabytes, and we are able to support the maximum. If you go to the cloud, then you can have three times more. For example, if you have a unit with 100 terabytes, then you can have an additional 300 terabytes in the cloud with the same license.

I would rate Quest QoreStor an eight out of 10. The reason why it is not a 10 is that it is still a new product, and they need to increase their capacity.

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.

The most valuable features are replication and deduplication. It removes the need for me to be swapping tapes in our backups to the system. It's valuable for us to have copies of our backups in different locations, just in the event of a natural disaster or some sort of offline anomalies at a location.

The features we use for the data deduplication are nice because we're able to back up a much larger amount of data, yet it doesn't necessarily take up that much data on the devices.

The management interface is in need of improvement. The graphical user interface (GUI) for the web management tools appears clunky, and not super intuitive. It seemed that there were some more features on the DR Series that are no longer available in the QoreStor product.

We would like a better facility to back up data to removable media.

We have been using Quest QoreStor for between two and three years.

We have had no issues with the stability of QoreStor. The last time we had any such problem was with our previous solution, the DR Series.

Scalability is all just a matter of licensing. If we wish to scale, obviously we would increase the storage on the device and just increase our licensing. We would contact Quest for any additional configuration that may be necessary.

It's extremely scalable in my opinion, although we have not had to scale it at all because we planned accordingly.

Being that the product is used for backup storage, there are only three of us who have access to the tools that access the QoreStor. Their roles are all IT-related; IT help desk and IT management.

The product is not being used extensively, although that is because of the size of our company. Currently, it's just being used for backup repositories and deduplication of the data. We do have plans to increase our usage.

We subscribe to the premiere support and what stands out to us as the biggest value is communication and the availability of techs.

Premier supports has added value to our overall investment with Quest. We've been working on a trial of another product of the same company. The communication has been very good and that's on a product that we don't even own. I believe that is in part because we're a preexisting customer with an adequate level of support.

Overall, I would rate the support an eight out of ten.

This solution was actually an upgrade from a previous product of Quest's called the DR Series deduplication appliances, DR4100s, that we upgraded due to end-of-life on the previous hardware. We had originally purchased it from Dell.

Our previous backup software was the Veritas product. We did not like the product, although it does have a deduplication option. We only use QoreStor for deduplication and the process is much smoother, faster, and more efficient.

With QoreStor, the deduplication is handled on the appliance. It is not a software-based application that is doing the backup, and it seems that the backup is completing in a much more timely manner. From what we can tell, it is not saving duplicate items, so it seems to be doing its job. We have a very good percentage of savings. According to statistics reported by the appliance, we've got 83% total savings on our system because of the deduplication. This can be compared to when we were trying the other product, where it was about half of that.

We switched because when Dell transferred control of the product back to Quest, the hardware went end-of-life prematurely. Rather than dealing with a new product from Dell, coupled with the fact that we liked the DR product, we continued with them by purchasing our own hardware from Dell and installing the QoreStor software.

Given my level of knowledge of the Linux operating system, it was complex. That aside, it was much easier and straightforward than I expected. The implementation was quick and painless.

The complexity came about because of my unfamiliarity with Linux when preparing the servers for the installation of QoreStor. Once the servers were properly configured and prepared, the installation was simple. It was just a case of running a simple script.

The entire deployment, including the configuration of the hardware, took no more than an hour. Our deployment strategy began with racking and stacking the hardware, then we moved on to install the operating system and finally installed the product.

Once the product was installed, we began creating the containers and slowly remapped our backups to the containers on the QoreStor appliance. We left the original DR Series in place for a short time. Then, we just used that for just a few months as a temporary location for the archives of the old data while we got familiar with QoreStor.

We had two implementations. The second implementation was a similar situation where we were replacing a DR Series with a QoreStor, and it was the same with that product. Once the equipment was racked and stacked, the installation was smooth and painless. We just created new containers, then began replication from old to new.

Quest assisted us with the implementation. Their deployment technician was on a virtual session with us over the phone, and we had it up and running in a few minutes. Once the Linux base is properly configured for the product, you just install the application. I took over from there, being familiar with the product.

I am responsible for the maintenance, although there is little to none that needs to be done. The QoreStor product has a self-cleaning tool that cleans all of the data. The replication is automatic once configured. The only maintenance I do is if I need to create a new container for a new backup job.

I do tend to go into the hardware from time to time, but that's not really related to the QoreStor appliance. It's more related to making sure that the physical hardware and drivers are up to date. I have not yet had to do OS updates or firmware updates but when that time does come, I'll probably coordinate that with Quest, since we've got an ongoing maintenance contract with them for the maintenance.

The price of licensing is a little bit high. We have a contract and we pay annually.

The cost is per terabyte, and overall, the cost was reasonable when compared to some competitors. We planned accordingly; we knew how much data we had and we knew what our potential for growth was at the time, so we budgeted for that growth.

Seeing as we've only reached 35% capacity of these devices, I can say that we definitely overbuilt for the storage and that was obviously reflected in the cost. However, I recall that on the last unit we replaced, it was priced reasonably. In fact, less than I had originally budgeted.

There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees but it is related to a third party. We pay for software licensing to utilize certain features of that software to communicate better with the QoreStor. For example, Symantec Veritas Backup Exec requires the purchase of a deduplication license, regardless of whether or not it's a Symantec deduplication product that's being used. We will be getting rid of that.

Prior to QoreStor, I was not involved in evaluating other products. My predecessor, who chose the DR Series, did a lot of research on the product and at that time opted for the DR Series.

When it was my turn to evaluate the upgrade replacement, we chose what we felt to be the easiest transition. Also, it was reasonably priced to continue with Quest and go with their QoreStor product. This really helped us because it was compatible with the DR Series, so we didn't have to purchase two of these appliances at the same time. Rather, we could just replace the one that went end-of-life with a new QoreStor appliance that we built up.

That communicated with our older system in our other location, which we then swapped out, perhaps about a year ago, with a new QoreStor appliance. Now they're both on the same build, same version, and same hardware.

We may be slightly behind the current version, although that is only because I am too busy with other things to upgrade it at the moment.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing QoreStor is to plan well. Evaluate what you have and plan for the capacity. From my experience, I would have to say that working with the Quest technicians to do remote implementation was definitely a time-saver and worth the cost.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this product is that backup to file is actually more than adequate, and really a time-saver compared to backing up to tape. One caveat is that we do not have an easy method of backing up to removable media at this time.

If it was more scalable in that manner, to back up to removable media, then that would be helpful. Part of that may have been in our planning stages, as we didn't consider that with the hardware that we purchased. In any event, it would be nice if it had an easier method to replicate to removable media that could be safely taken offsite and stored independently. Not cloud, not offsite as in remote storage, but something we could actually physically take from the building and put it in a safe somewhere.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

The most valuable feature is that it is low maintenance. It runs like a self-maintenance script and I like that I don't have to actually think about doing anything for it. It does it on its own.

It depends on how you're using archiving, but it does do deduplication and you can replicate between units. We're currently not doing that necessarily. We were before, but we're not doing that anymore.

It has a cloud tier so you can expand your storage to the cloud. And so you can replicate your storage to the cloud or expand it so it moves up into the cloud. But we're currently not using the cloud tier.

QoreStor works with almost any backup software server and storage hardware. We were focused on ours, which was Veeam. We use Veeam for backup. It was important to us because I wanted the flexibility to be able to change other vendors if I needed to. Not that I'm interested in changing, but I have switched backup vendors in the past. And we haven't really considered changing virtualization at all, but it's nice to have that option.

The installation could use improvement. The initial installation was a little touchy and it's not really user-installable. You have to have a connection to support to install.

I have been using QoreStor for a couple of months. 

It's pretty stable. We haven't had any issues since we put it in place.

We have two users who use QoreStor. Both of us do the same thing. 

There are two of us in the IT department. Our company uses it and it's a company backup storage, so about 40 people use it.

We don't really have any plans yet to increase usage but it'll continue to be our backup storage until it needs to be replaced.

Their technical support is good. Every time I've called them, they've been responsive and knowledgeable.

I switched to Quest because I had to. The old software was deprecated and I needed to replace the entire unit hardware and software together with some other solution or I could implement QoreStor and I could keep the hardware.

The initial setup took an hour or two. The backup solution was already in place. All we did was schedule an update or an installation date with Quest and we connected remotely and then they put the software on the current storage and it picked up where the old stuff already was. So we didn't lose anything in the process.

We did not use an integrator or reseller for the installation. 

The big return was that I didn't have to replace the hardware. That's the big return on investment.

We did not really evaluate other solutions. The big choice was to rip and replace with the hardware and put in a new solution, which was much more costly. We probably looked at a few vendors and I kept going back to the discount that I was getting because I was already a customer. The implementation for a QoreStor just made more sense.

I would rate QoreStor a nine out of ten. 

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%.

Deduplication is the most valuable feature. It saves us a lot of space. When we back up 100 terabytes of data, after dedupe, it only uses maybe five to six terabytes for the disk space in QoreStor. 

We don't use replication features. We use a backup software to control the replication.

Right now, we only present QoreStor to the backup server. So the backup server, of course, will talk to software like a vSphere environment and the other data store. But I think all the backup servers come between the other stores and QoreStor.

We rely on QoreStor to do deduplication, which means that it's faster for us. Of course, the backup software can work with QoreStor to acquire dedupe, which reduces network traffic a lot.

In terms of improvement, we would like to have an Air Gap feature to prevent a virus from attaching to something. So that when we don't do a backup, we want the QoreStor to stay offline. It would be a nice feature to have.

I have been using Quest QoreStor for two years.

I'm the primary role that is involved with QoreStor and I also have a backup. But I'm the only one who works with QoreStor right now.

We haven't had a stability problem in the last two years. 

We don't have plans to increase usage. It is a part of enterprise backup solutions so at the moment, we only use them for the backup.

Quest support is very knowledgeable. I haven't needed to call them since the implementation. We only used them for the deployment. 

We also compared to the other products. We used the previous version of QoreStor. We upgraded from a previous version of QoreStor to the new one. I don't know what the cost difference is.

The initial setup was straightforward and went smoothly. I worked with support and deployed it. I don't remember having any problems. It was "next, next, next, done." The entire deployment was done in less than a day. 

Quest support helped us with the deployment. 

QoreStor is capacity licensed. So we have acclimated all the capacity requirements for the next three years and we never have problems with the licensing.

There are no additional costs in addition to standard licensing. 

We looked at Data Domain. One reason we chose QoreStor was because we already used the previous version of it. QoreStor and the backup software of both come from Quest.

The second reason we went with QoreStor is because compared to Data Domain, it is less costly. Data Domain is more expensive. The nice part about Data Domain is that they have the Air Gap feature which QoreStor does not have.

It's a good product. QoreStor has a lot of features that I don't know about. It would be nice to take advantage of these features by getting updates from them that these features exist.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

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.

QoreStor seems to do a fabulous job of deduplication and compression. Otherwise, some of this could get pretty expensive in terms of storage costs. The fact that it can really cut that data down is great. The dedupe and compression are pretty extreme. On disk, we're getting dedupe rates of up to 65 percent of data and compression of 34 percent. When you go to the cloud, it's more like 76 percent for dedupe and almost 50 percent for compression.

I can only replicate into one cloud environment or what they call a Cloud Tier. This might be because of the level of my license, but I was hoping, for security of data, to be able to back up into multiple Cloud Tiers. The cloud provider I work with has facilities where I am, here in Boston, but they also have a facility in Dallas and pretty soon they're going to have a facility in London. But the current software that I have will only allow me to do one. It would be nice to have the security of knowing that, in a super-disastrous situation where we lost our data center and the cloud environment in the same facility, we would have data stored remotely in another facility across the country. It would cost me twice as much but it's not very expensive to put this relatively small amount of data into the cloud. If I had that option I would do it.

We first heard about QoreStor from Quest in January of 2019. I did a call with some of the Quest folks to talk about it. So it's been a little over two years now.

The combination we have of NetVault and QoreStor just runs. It's not something I tend to think about all the time. NetVault backup jobs will fail now and then, and you've got to go in and try to figure out what happened. But I wouldn't say QoreStor itself really fails.

I really don't have to think about QoreStor too much. Every so often I used to look at the dashboard to see how much data was being stored. Because of the dedupe and compression, the amount of data that's actually out there on disk and in the cloud is almost identical to what it was six months ago. In part that's because we're making small, incremental changes to our applications, and after three to six months we're also eliminating backups. When you take stuff away and you add stuff in, it grows in very small amounts over time. It's staying within this window of what I can afford.

At the end of the day we don't really have to restore data all that frequently because it doesn't happen that we lose data very often. It's more like a security blanket. Every so often you need to get some data back, but mostly it's just knowing it's there if we need it.

I would imagine you could put about as much data as you want on there. I don't really know what they claim as their upper limit, but we're only backing up 5 TB on disk and under 10 TB in the cloud at the moment, and that's been running for over a year.

Being such a small outfit, I've never really talked to anybody about replicating all of our data center into another location, so that we have a real disaster recovery solution. I would guess it would significantly increase our cost. Knowing that the data is there is the biggest thing. We're not a bank, we're not a high-availability type of environment like some places might be. Needless to say, I care about our data. I don't want to lose it, for sure, because that would cause a lot of problems for people, but I don't think we're going to have the wherewithal for a real disaster recovery solution. Maybe over time, as we get better involved with the cloud, we'll find we can improve things there.

I can't say I've ever had any major issues working with their technical support. They're pretty responsive. Over the years, backups create problems now and then and things go a little haywire. They have been a strong company in terms of support.

The main reason I got interested in it was that we built our virtual infrastructure about five years ago when we had to move into our co-location facility. We're pretty much a Dell EMC shop. We purchased their Compellent storage technology and used VMware to build out our virtual infrastructure. Along with that, we bought a Dell EMC Tape Library for backup purposes, which was the first time we had had a tape library. As a small shop, with the lowest level of tape library, we were able to back up all of our data, full backups and incrementals, onto tape. It worked pretty well for us. But when QoreStor came along, one of the advantages was getting rid of tape and going to disk and cloud. That's what got me intrigued by it. We moved forward and purchased a license for QoreStor and we were able to decommission our tape library. That cut down on the overhead of having to manage the tape library.

The setup of the software is definitely not the easiest thing. I worked a lot with Quest engineers, especially in the early days when we were first testing it and trying it out. I actually had some of the developers working with us at one point because they were going through these point releases, and I was having trouble getting it to work in this S3-compatible situation. We got it all working eventually, but setup is definitely not the easiest thing in the world. Maybe that's just true of this kind of software. I don't know if you can make it easier or not, but it was pretty tricky getting the whole thing working, initially.

We started testing in August of 2019 and we actually weren't in production until February of 2020. By that time we had to go through the upgrade from version 6 to 6.1, where they had the S3-compatible feature. So it actually took quite a while. Overall, it was at least a six-month process for us. We were in the product pretty early, so I'm not sure it would take that long today, but it was pretty dicey for a while until we finally got things working. The earlier version was not ready to work with S3-compatible cloud environments like Dell EMC, but the later version was.

We're a small company. I'm pretty much the only person who spends any regular time with backup. I'm the one who's been doing backups for years here. I'm also the director of the organization, but it's just part of the job that I do. I'm the "equipment guy" and I've been doing backups for a couple of decades. The expertise of the Quest folks is what made it possible.

We worked with Quest. They were really good. They had some internal staff that helped us build a system and get things going. And when we ran into trouble, as I mentioned, they brought in some developers to help us out. 

We had a problem that was surprising. The cloud provider was upgrading their equipment, which they do fairly often as it turns out. And one day they said, "Okay, tonight, we're going to upgrade the equipment. So we'll be back running tomorrow." The next day, all of a sudden, it was not working and we were not able to replicate into their cloud. We wondered, "What happened here?" 

This is where Quest's engineers got involved and it turned out it wasn't really a QoreStor issue. It was because of the certificates involved in the cloud environment that weren't managed correctly. As a result, QoreStor wouldn't recognize that it was a valid place to store data. It took quite a while to figure out where the problem was. Quest was really good at trying to help troubleshoot that. It was a pain to deal with it, but we finally got it solved. That wasn't Quest's problem but they wanted to help us figure out what the issue was.

The price is acceptable, it was definitely within our means.

The license is a perpetual license. Ours is a 5 TB license and, as long as my data stays within that limit for disk—they actually triple the amount you can put into the cloud—that license is going to keep me going indefinitely. I will probably purchase maintenance at some point, after a year or two, to get the upgrades to the software.

The initial license came with three years of maintenance so we're still within that window and haven't had to buy additional maintenance yet. We had to make sure, on the storage side of the house, that we had enough disk space to allow for that short-term storage. Because we came from tape, we hadn't needed that so much, but going to more of a disk- and cloud-based backup, we had to buy up half a dozen disk drives to help build out the storage environment.

If you have a lot of data and you're going to go disk to cloud, then you have to have the disk space in your environment or in your cloud environment.

I didn't evaluate any other options because we've been using NetVault and working with Quest for a long time. It was just taking advantage of an opportunity to try out this new product they had. I wasn't really shopping for this solution. They came to me and said, "Hey, we have this solution. Can we talk to you about it?" I didn't anticipate even going down this path. It wasn't something I was looking for. But as they talked about it, and I thought about our tape environment, I was willing to try it and they were willing to put some time in to show us what it would do. They showed us and we just stepped our way into it.

If you're in a situation where you're still using tape, at a minimum, this is worth investigating.

For me, the biggest lesson was the exposure it gave me to the cloud environment. Prior to using this, I had heard people talk about AWS, and I had heard semi horror stories about how you never know what it's going to cost you if you get involved in that environment. We worked with our local co-location company and they had built out their own cloud environment. So it was a really good opportunity for me to dip my toes in cloud. From what I can tell, Quest is clearer about what your costs are going to look like. In this case, we're just paying for that cloud storage cost. They give me a number so that I can calculate, based on how many terabytes of data, what it's going to look like, and what it is potentially going to look like a year or two from now. If my data continues to grow at the rate it's growing, then I know it's within the tolerance of what I can afford. That was a great learning experience. It was nice to move down the technology path and to get a little more familiar with the cloud environment. That was a useful step forward for a small business, like ours, that hadn't really been there.

Along with the deduplication, it also provides replication and archiving capabilities, but we don't run that. You have to build out another infrastructure somewhere else to do that, or maybe have another license of QoreStor that they can mount somewhere else. We haven't needed to go to that level.

Prior to using Qorestor, we hadn't ever done any cloud backups. But when it starts to back up into the cloud there's a pretty big spike on IO as all that data is moving across. When I look at my IO over 24 hours, there are two big spikes which happen when the data is flowing into the cloud environment. I'm not sure it would make any difference, but the cloud environment is also in the same location as our cabinet infrastructure, our server infrastructure. We're right in the same data center where the cloud equipment is. It hasn't compromised our network traffic in any fundamental way.

Overall, it just does the job. I don't really have to think about it. It was really just the complexity of the setup that would drop my rating of it a little bit, to eight out of 10. But my experience has been good with it.