DCIG 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide Now Available
Today DCIG and SMB Research are pleased to jointly announce the availability of a new, comprehensive 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 20 virtual server backup software products. This Buyer's Guide gives small, medium and large enterprises the resources they need to assist them in making what is becoming one of their most critical buying decisions: procuring a solution that protects the data of their virtualized application servers.
The intent of this Buyer's Guide is to minimize the heavy lifting that enterprises typically need to do when researching enterprise level data protection and recovery solutions for their emerging virtual infrastructures. This first annual 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide provides an "at-a-glance" comparison of available backup software products and serves as an excellent starting point for enterprises looking to implement the best backup software for their virtual environment.
In building this Buyer's Guide, I worked collaboratively with Robert Eastman and Miles Prescott of SMB Research. Together we identified and researched over 30 different offerings and more than 130 different features across seven categories that combine to make up a virtual server backup software solution.
Like the earlier Midrange Array Buyer's Guide that DCIG released in 2010, there again was no "up-front" fee that vendors had to pay to be included in this Buyer's Guide nor was there any preference given to certain vendors. Each product had to stand on its own technical merits and was evaluated accordingly.
To reach our conclusions and recommendations in this Buyer's Guide, we drew upon publicly available information, surveys sent to and completed by each vendor and feedback that we received from end-users. Once our research was complete, we then went through and scored and ranked the features on each product. We broke the features down seven categories with the five most prominent being: Backup, Restore, Management, Technology and Service and Support.
Then to help users in their decision making process, we created a standardized 2-page data sheet for each backup software product that we evaluated. Each data sheet breaks down what features the backup software does and does not support as well as lists how the product scored in each of the five major categories listed above.
Once all of these features were scored, we then tabulated the scores. After doing so, our results showed the following to be the Top Ten Solutions in The DCIG 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide (in alphabetical order):
Some of the more notable findings that came out of this Buyer's Guide included:
John Johnson, the manager of IT Consulting with Sirius Computer Solutions, found it very informative and an excellent follow-up to the 2010 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide. Johnson says, "I really like the quantitative analysis and scoring of competitive products. This lends more credibility to the product comparisons which makes it more useful for anyone looking at virtual server backup solutions."
Another IT systems manager with an international property management firm (who asked to remain anonymous) also is looking forward to leveraging this Buyer's Guide to evaluate backup software to protect his virtual environment in the near future. After reviewing it, he wrote, "The 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide provides a great overview of the solutions available to address this critical component of server virtualization."
I am personally grateful that so many find these Buyer's Guides valuable as they look to make buying decisions about this critical piece of technology. I regularly talk to end-users who are always being asked to do "more with less" while given less resources to gather the information that they need to do so. This can be especially difficult when it comes to purchasing backup and recovery software since buying decisions about this software are made infrequently.
My colleague, Bob Eastman at SMB Research, sums up the purpose of this Buyer's Guide well, when he says, "It's about delivering the right research and right analysis to end-users at the right time for the right reasons. We fully expect that with the continued growth in server virtualization this Buyer's Guide will serve as the seminal document in helping enterprises best understand their backup and recovery options. This will help augment their internal due diligence and evaluations as they seek out the best available solution to meet their needs."
The 2011 DCIG Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide is available immediately and may be downloaded for no charge at this link.
I have also put together a short YouTube video that further explains some of the benefits of using this Buyer's Guide.
The intent of this Buyer's Guide is to minimize the heavy lifting that enterprises typically need to do when researching enterprise level data protection and recovery solutions for their emerging virtual infrastructures. This first annual 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide provides an "at-a-glance" comparison of available backup software products and serves as an excellent starting point for enterprises looking to implement the best backup software for their virtual environment.In building this Buyer's Guide, I worked collaboratively with Robert Eastman and Miles Prescott of SMB Research. Together we identified and researched over 30 different offerings and more than 130 different features across seven categories that combine to make up a virtual server backup software solution.
Like the earlier Midrange Array Buyer's Guide that DCIG released in 2010, there again was no "up-front" fee that vendors had to pay to be included in this Buyer's Guide nor was there any preference given to certain vendors. Each product had to stand on its own technical merits and was evaluated accordingly.
To reach our conclusions and recommendations in this Buyer's Guide, we drew upon publicly available information, surveys sent to and completed by each vendor and feedback that we received from end-users. Once our research was complete, we then went through and scored and ranked the features on each product. We broke the features down seven categories with the five most prominent being: Backup, Restore, Management, Technology and Service and Support.
Then to help users in their decision making process, we created a standardized 2-page data sheet for each backup software product that we evaluated. Each data sheet breaks down what features the backup software does and does not support as well as lists how the product scored in each of the five major categories listed above.
Once all of these features were scored, we then tabulated the scores. After doing so, our results showed the following to be the Top Ten Solutions in The DCIG 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide (in alphabetical order):
- Arkeia Software Network Backup v9
- Asigra Cloud Backup
- CA ARCServe r15
- CommVault Simpana 9
- EMC Avamar
- HP Data Protector 6.1
- IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6
- Quest Software vRanger PRO 4.5
- Symantec Backup Exec 2010
- Veeam Backup and Replication
Some of the more notable findings that came out of this Buyer's Guide included:
- Some 46% of the software vendors participating in this Buyers guide offer their solutions as stand-alone software products or bundled in an appliance that is available from them.
- Nearly 80% of the software solutions are able to do object-level recovery.
- 75% of the vendors in this Buyers Guide offer source-based deduplication.
- Nearly 60% of vendors claim to be able to alert you if your tape libraries are approaching capacity (compared to 85% of vendors for disk libraries.)
- 70% of vendors provide the capability to auto-discover new Guest VMs.
- The ability prioritize a server that has gone the longest since its last backup
- Detect servers backing up significantly more data than previously and provide alerting
- Integration with VMware's Change Block Tracking
- Integration with VMware vCenter Converter
- Ability to multiplex concurrent backups to a single tape drive
John Johnson, the manager of IT Consulting with Sirius Computer Solutions, found it very informative and an excellent follow-up to the 2010 Midrange Array Buyer's Guide. Johnson says, "I really like the quantitative analysis and scoring of competitive products. This lends more credibility to the product comparisons which makes it more useful for anyone looking at virtual server backup solutions."
Another IT systems manager with an international property management firm (who asked to remain anonymous) also is looking forward to leveraging this Buyer's Guide to evaluate backup software to protect his virtual environment in the near future. After reviewing it, he wrote, "The 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide provides a great overview of the solutions available to address this critical component of server virtualization."
I am personally grateful that so many find these Buyer's Guides valuable as they look to make buying decisions about this critical piece of technology. I regularly talk to end-users who are always being asked to do "more with less" while given less resources to gather the information that they need to do so. This can be especially difficult when it comes to purchasing backup and recovery software since buying decisions about this software are made infrequently.
My colleague, Bob Eastman at SMB Research, sums up the purpose of this Buyer's Guide well, when he says, "It's about delivering the right research and right analysis to end-users at the right time for the right reasons. We fully expect that with the continued growth in server virtualization this Buyer's Guide will serve as the seminal document in helping enterprises best understand their backup and recovery options. This will help augment their internal due diligence and evaluations as they seek out the best available solution to meet their needs."
The 2011 DCIG Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide is available immediately and may be downloaded for no charge at this link.
I have also put together a short YouTube video that further explains some of the benefits of using this Buyer's Guide.
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Why was this test run with Symantec Backup Exec rather than Symantec NetBackup Enterprise Server???
When we started putting this Buyer's Guide together, the intended audience of the Buyer's Guide was small and medium enterprises so we elected to leave Symantec NetBackup out and only cover Backup Exec . However in retrospect it is now clear that we should have included NetBackup as we are already receiving feedback that this Buyer's Guide is finding its way into large enterprises. It is our intention to cover NetBackup in the next Buyer's Guide.
I also want to be very clear that no "tests" (as in Hand's on Testing) were done in preparing this Buyer's Guide. This Buyer's Guide is strictly an evaluation of each product based upon publicly available information and surveys completed by the participating vendors regarding their individual features. To conclude that any formal "hand's on" testing of any of the products covered in this Buyer's Guide would be erroneous.
Hello,
And what's about Symantec PureDisk ?
And what's about the gartner who put Avamar on the best position for dedup and virtualization backups ?
Laurent
A very interesting and comprehensive report. I did spot some things in there that I feel are worth questioning.
You mark Quest vRanger Pro as having 20 in Technology and Veeam as 17 but Veeam has less ticks in the unsupported column. How does the scoring work for that section?
You also say that HP Data Protector doesnt support the vStorage API (it does) but does have the ability to dedupe the data (DP doesnt have any dedupe ability other than to integrate with dedupe appliances).
Laurent,
(1) Symantec PureDisk is the deduplication engine for NetBackup. This particular Buyer's Guide focused on the backup software for virtual servers, and, among other things, the deduplication capabilities of the backup software solutions. With deduplication - and engines like PureDisk - getting so much focus from so many different directions these days, deduplication deserves some dedicated focus. You will see a future DCIG Buyer's Guide focusing on deduplication.
(2) Re: Avamar and best position for dedup and virtualization backups by another Analyst firm. I cannot comment on how another analyst firm assessed the particular capabilities of one of the vendors included in the DCIG study. Such differences can obviously stem from different features / functions of different versions looked at, using different survey or research methodologies, against different criteria, or other differences.
Simon,
(1) Ticks for one vendor vs another on the data sheets: The data sheets are provided for the purpose of displaying the features and functions supported by the vendors, rather than to serve as "evaluation score raw sheets". This Buyer's Guide looked at some 130 different features and functions; it was not possible (or probably desirable, from any practical standpoint) to include all of the features / functions evaluated on the data sheets. Therefore, it is not appropriate to conclude that a data sheet with more or less tick marks for the features displayed on a data sheet will correlate to a higher or lower final score.
(2) HP Data Protector: The information that we are presenting for specific features on the data sheet is as the vendor represented their capabilities to us; the data sheet information comes directly from information provided to us by the vendors.
Wonder if vendors marked themselves down when not all features were available on all VM platforms they support?
(Example only, not real data)
Vendor 1:
VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels, Citrix, XenServer - Object-level not supported
vs
Vendor 2:
VMware ESX - Object-level supported
CA ARCserve is the best product!
INCLUDES DATA DEDUPLICATION
INCLUDES GRANULAR RESTORE OF ACTIVE DIRECTORY
INCLUDES INFRASTRUCTURE VISUALIZATION
INCLUDES PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT DASHBOARD
INCLUDES ENHANCED SRM REPORTING
Why should i get charge for these feature. I can do more with less with CA ARCserve backup. I hear their next release withh have a cloud solution that will be the market leading technology which will be a game charger for FUTURE IT!
Where is Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager?
Why does the link to download the report go to the CommVault website? Did CommVault pay DCIG to put together this buyers guide?
It seems like a bit of a coincidense that CommVault come out as the leader and you download the buyers guide from the CommVault website.
I also find it strange that the buyers guide is missing Netbackup yet IBM TSM is listed in the buyers guide and your excuse was that you were aiming at the small to medium enterprise. In my experience IBM TSM is rarley found in small to medium enterprise environments. I have always seen IBM TSM in large enterprise environments.
Because of this, I am starting to doubt the credability of this report. It just sounds like DCIG have put this buyers guide together for CommVault and have not performed a true analysis of each product in the market place.
Collective Grooves,
Thanks for the feedback but most of your concerns are addressed in the prior comments above as well as in another blog entry that can be accessed at http://www.dcig.com/2010/12/responding-to-criticisms-of-2011-vsbs-bg.html.
Also, for me to answer any of your other particular questions not already addressed in the other comments or blog entry, it is now DCIG's policy that you provide your full name, a valid company email address and the company you work for before responding so as to maintain appropriate levels of professionalism and transparency on this website
Jerome