Quadric Software

Celebrating 8 Years in Business!

Quadric Software just turned eight! On February 12th, 2016, Quadric Software celebrated 8 years in business, and we’re proud to say that over the years, we have gained a reputation as one of the most advanced backup and disaster recovery solutions to users worldwide.

As we commemorate our 8th year, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank our customers and supporters for helping us make Alike the leading BDR solution in the XenServer market, and for supporting our efforts to expand to other platforms and markets.

We hope you will join us in celebrating eight wonderful years of growth and success that would not have been possible without the thousands of organizations our software has protected over the years. This post highlights just how far we’ve come since 2008 and expands on just a few of the many milestones in our history.

Milestones

As you can see, it’s been an exciting journey for Quadric Software since we were founded eight years ago. We’ve had quite a few milestones, from the addition of Hyper-V and Windows physical platforms to the more recent release of Alike v4.0 with its completely redesigned web user interface.

One of the major milestones can be seen in the latest statistics from our 2015 Year in Review, demonstrating Alike’s incredible reach to users worldwide.

In 2015 alone, Alike:

• Protected 39,477,948 Systems
• Saved 5,340 PB of Storage Space
• Saved Customers $2,071,776,461 in Overall BDR Costs

We are proud to continue providing a product that has helped thousands of customers protect their assets, and also helped us grow from a small startup to a company that’s become a trusted name in the backup and disaster recovery software industry. Our products are now used in hundreds of countries around the world, and we are honored to share the story of how it all started.

2008: QuorumSoft is Founded

In February 2008, Phil Baskette (CEO) and Max Ekstrom (CTO) charted QuorumSoft Inc. The founders saw a need in the backup market for an easy to use, lightweight BDR solution that ensures accurate, complete, and fully recoverable backups. Before the business started, they had already begun developing and testing a high-profile beta called Nimbus, which officially launched in July, 2009. After another year of refining their beta project, Baskette and Ekstrom launched the Alike backup and recovery solution for XenServer in 2010, and QuorumSoft took off from there.

At its inception, Alike was offered as a complete solution for Citrix XenServer, providing image-level backups of VMs with an intuitive and simple interface. Administrators could easily schedule jobs, restore guests, and view reports on all archival activity. Alike was unique in its ability to provide transactionally-consistent backups of supported applications.

Most impressive was Alike’s powerful deduplication capabilities; Alike compressesed all guest backups, and regularly achieved compression ratios of 160:1 against a single active VM over time. This hallmark feature would continue to improve over the years to make Alike one of the most powerful and lightweight BDR solutions available.

2010: Alike Verified as Citrix Ready

2010 was an exciting year for QuorumSoft, mainly due to Alike’s verification as part of the Citrix Ready program. This program was designed to help customers identify third-party solutions that add the greatest value to Citrix Delivery Center Infrastructure solutions. Alike completed a rigorous verification process to ensure compatibility with Citrix XenServer.

“Citrix Ready makes it easier for customers to select the best application delivery products for their specific needs from the large number of solutions developed by the extensive Citrix partner ecosystem,” said John Bryan, director, Business Development for Citrix. “The Citrix Ready logo attests to the high quality of QuorumSoft’s product and its suitability for a Citrix environment.”

QuorumSoft CTO, Max Ekstrom, commented on what this would mean for their new company, “Citrix Ready dramatically increases our visibility to Citrix customers and channels, clearly demonstrating our commitment to providing solutions that add value to Citrix products. The offering also provides the basis for a community in which vendors and customers can interact and share information through the dedicated Citrix Ready e-marketplace.”

CEO Phil Baskette added, “Our goal is to help the XenServer community realize the archiving advantages of virtualization. Partnering with Citrix means XenServer customers can trust our solution to deliver on efficient agentless backups from the moment of installation.”

2011: QuorumSoft Introduces Alike DR

In 2011, QuorumSoft released Alike DR as part of its Alike product line to offer a complete disaster recovery and business continuity solution. This announcement was featured in several Virtualization Publications, including eWeek and DNS news.

DNS news reported, “The newly unveiled Alike DR is an addition to QuorumSoft’s flagship product, Alike Standard, and it provides a set of features and options to address the protection needs of XenServer infrastructures of all sizes. Alike DR can vault multiple point-in-time backups offsite and replicate entire virtual machines (VMs) to a secondary XenServer pool.”

“Alike DR is an ideal solution for any organization in healthcare, finance, law, government and other industries that is looking to maintain business continuity at times of natural disasters or unforeseen circumstances that disrupt operations,” said Max Ekstrom, founder and CTO of Quorum Software, Inc., in the release.”

2012: QuorumSoft Introduces Q-Hybrid Backups

2012 marked another milestone as QuorumSoft released Q-Hybrid, an innovative new way to perform backups without using XenServer snapshots. Q-Hybrid leverages the powerful XenServer hypervisor-based backup capabilities in Alike with an agent-like approach, which conducts application-consistent backups within Windows virtual machines (VMs).

In addition to addressing longstanding limitations of XenServer snapshots, Q-Hybrid bypasses XenServer hypervisor-based snapshots altogether, greatly reducing their storage overhead costs. Q-Hybrid combines the flexibility of and manageability of the hypervisor with the strengths of an agent-based backup. The new feature also protects volumes within VMs that are not visible to hypervisor itself, including iSCSI-based guest drives.

“We developed Q-Hybrid to solve the persistent problems confronting companies that use Citrix XenServer snapshot-based backups,” said Phil Baskette, co-founder and CEO, “Q-Hybrid solves two problems simultaneously. We reduce storage costs and we provide full application-consistent protection for all Windows operating systems.”

2013: QuorumSoft Changes Name to Quadric Software | Adds Support for Hyper-V and Physical Systems

2013 was a banner year for the company. After changing the name to Quadric Software, the company expanded Alike’s supported platforms to Hyper-V in May of that year. This provided Alike users with the ability to protect multiple hypervisors with a single installation of Alike, offering seamless support between Hyper-V and XenServer. Users could now backup, replicate, and restore to and from either hypervisor.

“Expanding our support for Hyper-V is a critical component in our long-term technology roadmap and a direct response to market demand for real innovation in backup and DR protection for multi-hypervisor environments,” said Phil Baskette, CEO, “Delivering this expanded capability is a major milestone and one that will deliver significant new value to our global customer base.”

In September of 2013, Alike extended its advanced backup and disaster recovery (BDR) support to physical systems. Organizations could now use Alike to protect their virtual environments as well as their vitally important physical systems.

“By expanding support to physical systems, the Alike BDR solution will vastly simplify the management of complex IT infrastructures,” said Phil Baskette, “With this new offering, we.re streamlining what is quite frankly a cumbersome process.”

Also in that year, managed service providers also gained huge benefits from the new solution. The Quadric Software MSP Advantage Program could then be used by managed service providers to generate new revenue by delivering pay-as-you-go backup, replication, and DR services for their customers. physical machines, as well as their VMs.

2015: Alike v4.0 Released

With the much anticipated release of Alike v4.0 in October 2015, Alike expanded its comprehensive suite of features designed to enhance the exceptional user experience and solidify its reputation as a highly efficient and affordable way to protect IT infrastructures of all sizes.

The biggest change was the introduction of a redesigned web-based management console that provides increased simplicity, speed, and visibility to protecting IT environments. Not only does the new console allow users can now to access and manage data backups remotely from any computer or mobile device, but managing data is now even easier with new features, such as the drag and drop control that expedites the setup of new backup, replication, and restoration jobs.

Also in v4.0, Alike DR’s popular offsite protection feature, Offsite Vaulting, was completely re-written for a faster, more resilient form of protecting environments from a site level disaster. And with added support for Amazon S3, users can now backup to and restore from the cloud and rely on Alike’s impressive deduplication to ensure backups sent to cloud save as much storage space as possible.

Alike v4.0 also offered improved performance, which can be easily monitored with new graphs and status indicators that display the big picture of Alike’s performance. Multiple interface views and reporting options also allow users to obtain details about individual hosts, VMs, and physical systems, and VM-level menu options make managing them simpler and quicker than ever before.

For users looking for optimal performance, v4.0 was designed with direct integration to Quadric’s online Knowledge Base for error explanation and troubleshooting recommendations, context sensitive suggestions. With this easy-to-access support right from the app, users can quickly solve problems and access performance tips.

Looking Ahead in 2016

On Quadric Software’s Founders day, February 12th, of 2016, CEO Phil Baskette shares his thoughts on what the future holds for the company: “We couldn’t be more pleased with our success over the years, even though like every startup, we hit a few potholes along the way.”

Baskette then speaks to the company’s succes, “Part of what makes us successful is our customer-driven approach to product development. Our company was founded on identifying a need in the market, and developing a product with an intuitive design that’s easy to use, while giving it an incredible amount of power under the hood.”

Perhaps it is this simple approach that’s the secret to Quadric Software’s continued growth and success. Add this to the founders’ expertise, a smart business model, and a passion to make a product that is, in the words of an Alike DR customer, “Easy to setup. Easy to maintain. Easy to Restore. Put simply, it just works.” Baskette adds a final note, “We definitely would not be here today without our customers and supporters, and we look forward to what the future holds for us.”

You can always stay up to date by visiting Quadric News or by following our Blog. And don’t forget to check us out on social media.

About Alike

Flexible, affordable, and easy to use, Alike offers a competitive suite of powerful backup and recovery solutions for XenServer, Hyper-V, and Windows physical platforms. The Alike DR disaster recovery features include enhanced replication and offsite vaulting to secure your assets and protect your business from disaster, while minimizing downtime and maximizing your system’s valuable resources. Put simply, we make software to make your life easier.

For more information or questions about pricing, contact us at any time to get a custom quote based on your needs, or put Alike DR to the test in your environment with our 30-day free trial.