QuorumLabs Debuts onQ Business Continuity Solution

Business continuity firm QuorumLabs announced the release of onQ, a disaster recovery solution that provides one-click recovery from a storage, server or entire site failure.

The onQ solution is currently available in dual-appliance configurations starting at $20,000, or via a monthly subscription model, the company said.

The appliance maintains ready-to-run, up-to-date virtual machine clones of all critical systems and integrates all hardware, storage and software needed to create, update, manage and run multiple virtual “Recovery Nodes” simultaneously. QuorumLabs is positioning the appliance as an affordable alternative to an enterprise-class system required by small to medium-size businesses.

“Most businesses would be seriously impacted by a system failure,” said the company’s president and CEO, Robert Habibi. “And backup alone isn’t enough—it only protects data, but doesn’t allow applications to get back online quickly. Our onQ solution handles every part of the recovery process, including those difficult and time-consuming steps that our competition expects customers to handle on their own. And we achieve this with a solution that is easy to install [and] manage and priced at a point that SMBs can afford.”

Among the features offered on the onQ are deduplication, in which the appliance sends only the parts of files that don't already exist on any other server onQ is protecting (if the same piece of data exists on any server protected by the appliance, it doesn't need to be sent), point-in-time recovery, server monitoring and site-to-site replication. The onQ also includes network storage support, which means businesses can use standard IP network storage to extend or replace QuorumLabs’ integrated storage.

“Business interruptions are an even greater hazard to SMBs than to large enterprises because they have fewer reserves to rely on,” said Bob Blakley, vice president and research director for the Burton Group. “Unfortunately, business continuity has been difficult for most midsize companies because of the expense of solutions and the requirement for in-house IT staff. QuorumLabs' offering is aimed at addressing these SMB issues.”

Data protection and recovery features for the onQ include full local backup of the entire system, support for physical and virtual servers, sub-file-level incremental updates, global deduplication at source, robust exclusion rules, restore to any snapshot level and file-level recovery to any snapshot level.

Stephen Parsonage, managing director of the IT Consultancy Group, said the only way to replicate what QuorumLabs has done is to integrate a number of individual components, which would require a $100,000 infrastructure at one site and $100,000 infrastructure at another site. "No product exists today that’s as comprehensive or as easy to use as the onQ business continuity solution,” he said. “QuorumLabs has engineered out the cost and complexity from traditional solutions and created a simple, turnkey appliance for a fraction of the cost."