Q Please can you provide some
background on Quorum – when/why
formed etc.?
A Formed as a spin off company from
a military computer manufacturer in the
US. The product was originally
designed to work on US naval ships
systems to recover if one part of the
ship was down. When it was brought
commercial it morphed into the onQ
solution. From there it went through a
year or so of research and development
and we sold our first commercial
appliance in 2009.
Q Who are the key personnel involved?
A The CTO is Marc Goroff. The policy
engine behind the onQ is his brain
child. He along with others formed a
core development team that is still intact
to this day. Our VP of development is
Kemal Balioglu
Q What are the company’s key milestones
to date?
A First US Sale 2009
First Austrailian Sale 2010
US DRaaS launch 2012
First UK Sale 2012
First Asian Sale 2013
Q Geographically, what’s the company’s
coverage to date?
A Strong in US, Canada, UK, Middle East,
Africa and Asia
Q What areas are ‘in the pipeline’?
A Looking to build out partnerships in the
rest of EMEA and South America
Q Similarly, what are your industry
sweetspots right now, and what others
are you going to target?
A Medium size enterprise companies
where compliance and disaster
recovery is critical, like Financial
Services, and retail. Other areas
of future growth would be health care,
government, legal, and manufacturing
Q How does Quorum work with/without
the Channel?
A In the US we are selling Direct and
through the Channel. Outside the US
we are 100% Channel business.
Q In more detail, what are your plans for
the European market?
A Looking for partnerships in Germany,
Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe in
the short term. Some discussions
already underway but looking for a lot
more. Also looking to provide DRaaS in
more European countries over the next
year or two.
Q Now we have all the ‘logistics
covered (!), please can you outline
the Quorum technology?
A We are an affordable disaster recover
solution for server networks, aimed at
medium size businesses that cannot
afford replicated data centers, but want
recovery in minutes not hours or days.
We keep virtual copies of the customer
servers ready to run immediately when
needed.
Q Please can you tell us a little bit more
about your high availability solution?
A We provide an onsite onQ appliance
to backup and leverage both Microsoft
VSS and proprietary technology to pre-
recover those protected systems as
Virtual Machines, ready to run inside
the appliance. When a protected server
goes offline, the customer can
immediately boot up the onQ virtual
equivalent and users are running again
within minutes!
Q And the disaster recovery one?
A The Disaster Recovery solution
leverages a second appliance at an
offsite location that recieves replicated
data from the HA appliance to provide
ready to run Disaster Recovery of all
servers should the need arise.
Q And, last but not least, the Hybrid
Cloud/DRaaS offering?
A The Cloud offering is a replacement
of the disaster recovery appliance with
a cloud based (tier 3 data center in
the UK) solution to provide not only
disaster recovery for the servers, but
also set up to mimic the production
LAN complete with virtual Firewall for
each customer.
Q And these are all brought together in
the onQ appliance?
A The same onQ technology is used for
all three solutions, designed to work
together to provide a complete High
availability / Disaster Recovery solution.
Q And where do onQ Cloud and Archive
Vault fit in?
A onQ Cloud is another name for the
hybrid cloud solution. While the Archive
Vault is an add-on appliance to the HA
or DR or both to provide extended long
term retention of the data that is
protected by the onQ. Standard onQ
provides 40 days of retention, while the
Archive Vault can extend this
indefinitely.
Q What are your technology’s USPs?
A A: Recovery time is the amount of time
it takes to boot the machine while
traditional methods require hours, (and
sometimes days) to recover.
B: Simple and easy to use product to
make disaster recovery capability
available to all IT skill sets, not requiring
specialized training.
C: Purpose built from the ground up.
D: All included in the appliance solution,
so no addition hardware or
configuration is required.
Q What has been the customer uptake to
date?
A Sales Volumes have increased steadily
since 2009. Currently in the US almost
half of the new customers are
leveraging the DRaaS options. We
expect this to start happening in our
other geographies over time.
Q Presumably you think that the market is
ready to embrace Platform-as-a-
Service?
A There is such a huge success and
growth in the platform as a service
model already, that there seems to be
no doubt that it will continue to
grow. In fact, our solution can
actually be thought of as an entry into
that market. By allowing Disaster
Recovery into the cloud, we are
allowing customers to test the PAAS
waters without the need to prematurely
risk impacting their current
environment.
Q Presumably, most of your customers
are comfortable with a Hybrid Cloud
model?
A Yes, in fact they would prefer that to a
direct to cloud model. They like the
peace of mind of having onsite
recovery, combined with not needing
to manage tapes or second sites for
offsite protection.
Q What do you see as the issues still
facing customers who are considering
the Cloud/Managed Services route?
A The most common concern with the
“Cloud” is the location of the data. Our
cloud by design is again purpose
built to keep customer data in
country. The other major concern
is with security and compliance.
Quorum realized this early on and took
steps to achieve PCI compliance
in the US and are working to add Hippa
compliance as well. By leveraging
these standards and methodologies, we
provide not only a secure environment
but one that can be audited and tested.
Q How important do you think is Open
Source, whether in the Cloud world or
not?
A Open source has provided a
mechanism to allow anyone to bring
an idea from concept to
product. Where as before only major
corporations had the ability to guide this
technological revolution.
Q How do you see the Cloud/Managed
Services market evolving over time – in
terms of who offers what?
A We are already seeing what this future
will bring. These service based
solutions will start offering connections
and interactions between them to result
in a fully meshed solution that is
personalized for each customer.
Q What can we expect from Quorum
during 2015 and beyond?
A onQ Cloud, Draas, and Hybrid Cloud
are all terms used to describe our cloud
offering.
Q Any other comments?
A We are seeing customers more and
more reliant on their systems in this
“Always Connected” world, and
providing our solutions will assist to
keep these customers to be competitive
in their ever evolving markets.
Box
Backing up Nisa Retail’s key data
Nisa Retail is a £1.5billion turnover company representing 2,500 retail stores across the UK.
The company began as a buying group, pooling the purchasing requirements of its members to increase negotiating power, drive down supplier cost prices and create benefits from economies of scale on
their behalf. Nisa was the brainchild of two grocery entrepreneurs, who in 1977 launched the
company as the Northern Independents Supermarket Association to protect the interests of independents against the insurgence of the national supermarket chains. Nisa is unique in every sense of
the word, from its humble roots to its rare, member-owned structure.
NISA, headquartered in Scunthorpe, represents over 1,200 members throughout the UK and employs over 280 staff in its Member Support Centre. The group also has extensive warehousing in Harlow, Scunthorpe, Stoke and Livingston as well as satellite units throughout the country.
The challenge
Technology is key to Nisa’s infrastructure to ensure its deliveries run smoothly and that all its member’s stores are stocked. The impact of losing data or having any downtime on servers is extremely costly to Nisa and its members. Nisa required a backup solution that was not only responsive but also fully compliant with the regulatory requirements for the UK’s retail sector.
After looking at the current business continuity plan, Nisa recognised that the disaster recovery plan for its internal servers was slow and inefficient. In the event of failure it would take days, even weeks to purchase and install new servers and in that time the cost of damage would be hard to calculate. Nisa needed something responsive to ensure its competitiveness in an aggressive marketplace.
The company needed a reliable disaster recovery solution to protect its 31 internal servers, which look after key parts of the business, including email, file and print, bespoke applications, domain controllers, SQL database, application document management, intranet, directory and federation services and electronic data interchange (EDI).
Solution
Through its disaster recovery partner, Covenco Recovery Services Ltd who are also the largest Quorum Reseller Partner in the UK, Nisa were introduced to Quorum and discovered that the Quorum solution was able to meet its requirements for a simple to use, reliable and robust disaster recovery solution. Quorum also had the added advantage of being the only PCI compliant solution on the market, allowing Nisa to protect its internal data at all times and comply with industry regulations.
Covenco advised on deploying two Quorum onQ appliances at the beginning of 2014 - one for its headquarters and one at a Covenco fulfilled recovery centre in Rotherham. For added resiliency, Nisa’s data is also stored in the private cloud.
In Rotherham, Nisa replicates its critical servers on site, which means they can be up and running in minutes rather than days if there is a system failure. If there is a major disaster, Nisa has the capacity to relocate staff to the Rotherham recovery centre to ensure business continuity.
Nisa’s IT team did much of the installation themselves for the Quorum’s onQ devices, with some additional support from Quorum’s and Covenco’s support team.
The onQ devices maintain up-to-date ready-to-run virtual machine clones of the group’s critical systems, so that they can run on the appliance, transparently taking over for failed servers within minutes. The onQ devices back up the servers daily, and some of the more critical servers twice daily.
OnQ keeps up-to-date copies of the operating system, application and data files on both the local and remote appliances – but, unlike conventional backup and recovery solutions, it also has ready-to-run “Recovery Nodes” standing by. If any of the protected servers fail, the Recovery Nodes can be started with a single click and have Nisa up running again in minutes. The entire process is totally self contained and doesn’t require any additional hardware or software.
For data that needs to be stored for longer, Nisa has deployed Quorum onQ Archive Vault, which provides a long-term archive backup of its critical data.
The benefits
With Quorum, Nisa’s disaster recovery strategy is not only resilient and efficient, it’s also simple to manage. Quorum’s solution fits into Nisa’s strategy whilst providing Nisa’s IT team with total peace of mind that the system is in safe hands.
Quorum’s solution has already paid off for Nisa. The group recently suffered a storage failure and some of its machines were corrupted. Quorum was used to restore systems to the production environment.
Darren Scarratt, Infrastructure Manager, Nisa Retail explained: “When we had a SAN failure the Quorum solution kicked into play straight away. This not only meant that we were able to keep working as usual, it also saved us a lot of time in rebuilding the systems. Having the Quorum in place reduces the pressure on the internal IT team. The group’s internal servers are critical to how we operate so having them protected means that we will be able to continue business as usual: serving customers and our members, should any failure occur.”
Quorum’s solutions have also enabled Nisa to make major cost reductions on back up requirements to virtual machines, reducing storage and making savings on licenses. “Quorum is a backup, HA and DR all in one for us,” Darren Scarratt concluded.
The partner’s view
Gurdip Sohal is Sale Director at Covenco comments “Covenco has been a long standing DR partner for Nisa. We have helped transition Nisa from traditional disaster recovery services through to providing high availability by deploying the Quorum Solution. The Quorum technology simplifies the recovery process whilst improving recovery time and recovery point objectives of our Customers.
