Quorum Instant Recovery of Applications and DataFrequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is an Quorum onQ™ appliance?

A Quorum onQ™ appliance is a complete turnkey Disaster Recovery Solution. One appliance provides complete high availability, protecting multiple servers from any combination of storage or system failures. Adding a second, replicated appliance provides complete disaster recovery in the event of a site failure.

Why do I need a Disaster Recovery Solution?

Backup, even on-line backup, doesn't provide rapid recovery in the event of a localized failure, let alone a site-wide disaster. Your systems are critical to the operations of your day-to-day business. If your applications are not available, your revenues and customer service are negatively impacted. Ninety percent of businesses that experience a 1 week outage go out of business within a year.

How is the onQ appliance different from backup solutions?

Simply stated, onQ™ clones your servers right onto our appliances and provides instant recovery of your business applications after any storage, system or site failure. And you can test it under real-world scenarios any time. Backup just can't do that.

Function How it works with Backup How it works with onQ
Recovery from system failure
  • Repair or replace hardware
  • Restore files from backup (tape, disk or online) to replacement
  • Elapsed time: 8 hours to 5 days
  • Click a button, virtual recovery node is started and users are reconnected automatically
  • Elapsed time: 5 minutes
Recovery from site failure
  • Set up DR facility
  • Set up spare hardware at DR facility
  • Restore files from backup (tape, disk or online) to replacements.
  • Elapsed time: 1–7 days
  • Click a button, virtual recovery nodes for all servers start on DR appliance and users are reconnected.
  • Elapsed time: 5 minutes
DR Plan Testing
  • Obtain duplicate hardware for test.
  • Restore files from backup (tape, disk or online) to test hardware
  • Perform user test cases against test hardware.
  • Tear down test setup.
  • Time & Cost: 2–7 days and thousands of dollars
  • Click a button, virtual recovery nodes for all servers start on a test network on the appliance. User test cases can be performed against recovery nodes.
  • Time & Cost: as little as 15 minutes depending on test cases, no incremental costs.

Don't I just get what the onQ appliance provides if I virtualize my servers?

Implementing Disaster Recovery Solution with virtualization requires many different components from different vendors. This typically includes:

  • Shared high performance network storage such as a SAN
  • Buying high powered servers that support multi-host virtualization for the local and remote site
  • Selecting a virtualization platform
  • Buying virtualization licenses
  • Selecting and buying a replication/synchronization solution to keep the remote environment synchronized with the local one
  • Migrating all of your servers to the virtual environment
  • Integrating management software that monitors the virtual machines and manages which backup virtual machine is “active”
  • Deploying a solution like the one above usually costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and requires a multi-month project using expert consultants.
  • onQ essentially gives you everything above in a turnkey appliance with a single user interface.  You can have it running in hours instead of months…at a fraction of the cost.

What applications does onQ support?

Quorum onQ is "application agnostic". Unlike other solutions, onQ does not use block-by-block disk imaging technology. It uses integrated operating system features to detect changed files and then using our powerful deduplication and sub-file-level incremental update technologies to transfer only changes to the appliance—even for files that are in use. It does this without any application-specific add-on modules.