How Do We Do It?

QuorumLabs onQ™ goes beyond network backup and online storage by keeping up-to-date, ready-to-run virtual machine clones of your critical system on our appliances.  You might have thought that running redundant data centers on replicated network storage was beyond your reach…but that is exactly what onQ integrated into our appliances.

onQ provides all the hardware, storage and software needed to create, update, manage and run multiple “Recovery Nodes” simultaneously. Multiple onQ appliances can synchronize with each other over any network. We integrate everything seamlessly and provide a single browser-based interface, so you’re not dealing with multiple products from different vendors with different interfaces.

Some core technologies:

• DCRM: our Distributed Computing Resource Management platform is the engine inside onQ.  It is a powerful automation platform for monitoring and managing both virtual and physical computing resources.  Originally developed for military applications, DCRM was spun out of Themis for commercialization.  DCRM provides QuorumLabs with a powerful and extensible architecture that can go well beyond the current business continuity capabilities of onQ.
• Global source deduplication: onQ only sends changes to the appliance that don't already exist on any other server at the site.  This is done with low resource loading right at the source.
• Sub-file-level incremental updates: it is common for large files to have only small changes made to them.  Some systems copy the entire file every time even a single byte changes.  For large databases such as Exchange or SQL, this can cause gigabytes of unchanged data to be copied.  onQ only send the changed "chunks", and it does this without resorting to disk-block-based algorithms, which have some significant disadvantages.  For example, onQ supports powerful regular expression matching for file and folder excludes which many block-based systems cannot do.  Why back up temporary and junk files?
• Near-continuous P2V: onQ keeps ready-to-run virtual machine "Recovery Nodes" (RNs) by merging incremental changes after each update interval.  No other product does this for native virtualization (bare metal hypervisor) platforms.