April 19, 2017

If you’re a regular visitor to our blog, you probably know the basics about onQ. Basics such as how we serve up expert backup and disaster recovery in whatever way you need it: virtual, physical appliances or DRaaS. While many of our customers opt for on-premises combined with cloud, we’re all about flexibility. You might even know our unexpected origins story: that onQ was developed for the U.S. Navy.

But in recent months we rolled out onQ 4.0 – and we’re getting questions on how it’s different. You can sum it up in these 3 words: security, simplicity and speed. onQ 4.0 is the industry's most complete suite of high availability, disaster recovery and hybrid cloud (DRaaS) solutions. Here are the ways 4.0 can help you:

• 1-click recovery. Our easy one-step instant recovery is more efficient than ever. Just one click and you’ll spin up a virtual clone of production servers.
• Intuitive new user interface. The new single-view UI is browser based and color-coded so you can immediately get a comprehensive overview and identify any issues. Our unified management console makes managing BDR easy.
• Speed. Imagine reducing your disaster recovery time from hours to minutes. Our recovery speed is faster than ever with a minimum of 25,000 IOPS, compared to 800 IOPS on the previous version.
• Automated DR testing and sandboxing. Clones are started and verified after each backup; a local subnet allows production level patch and configuration testing.
• The onQ POD. This addition to our hardware lineup can support from 150TB to 400TB over an 8U setup, which offers a real boost to larger scale enterprises. Need to scale storage and compute separately? No problem.
• Flexible migration tools and replication. You have the option of bare metal restore to same or different hardware. Your backups can be sent to your DR site or Quorum cloud (DRaaS).
• Security. Backup of your server image, apps and data are compressed and encrypted to provide you with a final line of defense against Ransomware.
• Deduplication. Data is deduped both at the source and destination, reducing bandwidth and storage requirements.
• Performance. Customers report being able to run directly on their appliance for weeks, with sustained high performance – in fact, better performance than production machines. Our appliances are equipped with NVMe flash cache; recovery nodes are located on a virtual SAN, which is composed in the cache. These nodes have direct access to compute as the virtual SAN can supersede the hypervisor -so if you’re booting from the recovery nodes, performance stays high.

So why did we create 4.0?

Because every day organizations tell us they want a unified solution that’s faster, simpler and safer. Too many IT teams are struggling with BDR solutions that are overly complex and time-consuming. Their leaders want more cloud options and easier solutions.

Consider what our State of Disaster Recovery Report 2016 revealed a few months ago:

The cloud is getting more popular. 75% of respondents are leveraging cloud based disaster recovery solutions, with 36% using a hybrid on premise and cloud model and 39% using only DRaaS. And 89% of respondents are planning on implementing more cloud based disaster recovery.

Teams are lost in multi-vendor chaos. 64% of respondents are using more than 3 different disaster recovery products with 26% using between 5-10. No wonder that 90% of respondents would be interested in consolidating their disaster recovery into one management console.

Recovery times are still too long. Over 80% say that it takes over an hour to recover from a server failure - despite 72% of respondents saying that speed of backup and recovery is extremely critical. It’s time for backup and disaster recovery to evolve to meet modern IT needs. That’s why we developed onQ 4.0 and it’s why we continue innovating even today. Take a look and see if 4.0 is for you.