On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Lisa Paton wrote:
I was impressed that Jim Ward (President of Workstation Solutions) came out to meet with me personally, AND could answer technical questions that the Veritas SE couldn't answer.
I was similarly impressed in my dealings with them. They may not have the market clout of a Veritas or a Legato, but I got the warm fuzzies when I first read about QuickRestore and visited WS' web site, when I talked to their sales rep (who got Jim Ward involved with my technical questions), and when I poked around the eval copy they sent us. No warm fuzzies when Veritas and Legato sent in their account reps and SE's to make their pitch to us, I'm afraid. ;-)
The software has the feel of a product written for, and by techies. It's highly customizable, but also fairly easy to mess up.
I don't get the feeling that QR is some huge, unwieldly monolithic piece of software that tries to do everything anyone could possibly want, but fails to really excel in any of them. It definitely has that "geek appeal" factor, whereas other vendors try to make up for it with a long-winded feature checklist in a marketing glossy. It doesn't pretend to hand-hold you through every step, obscuring real functionality with a GUI or some browser interface. Even the name "QuickRestore" tells me they understand that the *real* selling point of backup software is not how quickly it backs up your data, but how easily it can restore your data. ;-)
And since it costs less than half what Veritas costs, it's worth a little hassle with the interface. Like most backup software I don't expect to mess with it that much once things are stable.
It is about the third the cost of Networker, for our particular configuration (including maintenance contracts).
If you have any questions about my experience with QR, please feel free to drop me a line. I hope this helps any of you working on this issue.
Are you using QR on those ~50 workstations that used to be handled by Budtool? Do you see any inherent design limits that would prevent QR from handling all 200 workstations?