10-top-platforms-for-data-center-backup-and-recovery.jpg

10 top platforms for data center backup and recovery

Backup and recovery capabilities are among the most critical tasks that IT is entrusted with. Natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey demonstrate the advantages of backing up data in the cloud, where it can be accessed from other locations in the event of an emergency. With IT managers focused this week on data protection and disaster preparedness, Gartner looks at 10 of the leading providers for backup and recovery products.
The Leaders two.jpg

The Leaders

“Leaders have the highest combined measures of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision,” Gartner says. “They have well-articulated plans for enhancing recovery capabilities, improving ease of deployment and administration, and increasing their scalability and product breadth. A fundamental sea change is occurring in the backup and recovery market. For vendors to have long-term success, they must plan to address the legacy requirements of traditional backup and recovery, while looking to expand their integration with and exploitation of emerging applications, hypervisors, snapshot and replication technologies, and public cloud capabilities.”
Dell-EMC.jpg

Dell EMC

“Dell EMC offers data center backup software in multiple editions of Data Protection Suite (DP Suite),” Gartner explains. “The suites are sales bundles of relevant backup products, including Avamar and/or NetWorker as the key backup engines, augmented with alternative backup methods and additional capabilities through other components such as DD Boost for Enterprise Applications, ProtectPoint, CloudBoost, Search and Data Protection Advisor (DPA). Dell EMC offers aggressive discounts and often high attach rates of its backup solution to its primary storage sales. Dell EMC is one of the few vendors offering the use of low-cost cloud object storage for backup-based DR without persistent usage of cloud compute.”
Commvault.jpg

Commvault

“Commvault has the most expansive list of supported public cloud providers, hypervisors, big data support and database protection, providing technological liberty for future procurement decisions in other areas of the data center and beyond,” Gartner says. “Commvault has comprehensive and leading public cloud support as well as protection of O365 and Salesforce. IntelliSnap features the industry's broadest support for integrating with and exploiting storage hardware platform snapshots, directly supporting over two dozen of the top-selling storage arrays. Customers and references report a very high likelihood to repurchase the solution.”
IBM backup.jpg

IBM

“IBM's Spectrum Protect is offered as software from IBM or as an appliance from third-party partners, and can be deployed to protect small to extremely large enterprises,” Gartner explains. “Spectrum Protect supports physical and virtual environments, as well as a broad mix of applications, operating systems and backup target devices. A single instance of Spectrum Protect can protect a very scalable 4PB to 5PB of data. Spectrum Protect's new cloud accelerator capability boosts performance up to many TB/hour in a single Spectrum Protect server instance when writing to cloud storage, enabling customers to leverage the cloud for large environments. Customer support is rated highly by references.”
Veritas-Technologies.jpg

Veritas Technologies

“Veritas Technologies offers NetBackup for larger enterprises as software or as an integrated appliance, and offers Backup Exec for the midmarket,” Gartner says. “NetBackup is a proven, very scalable solution that can protect a diverse mix of physical, virtual and cloud workloads, with optional multitenant support. NetBackup and the NetBackup Appliances offer a highly scalable solution with a broad support matrix. References rate NetBackup highest for database protection of all of the products in this Magic Quadrant. Product quality and strength of technical support have been rated highly for the last two years.”
Veeam.jpg

Veeam

“Veeam is known for its agentless VM backup software for VMware and Hyper-V,” Gartner explains. “It recently added agent-based physical server backup software for Linux and Windows, including Windows Server applications such as Active Directory, Exchange, Oracle, SQL and SharePoint. Veeam has become the fourth- largest backup vendor (based on 2016 revenue), and is frequently showing up on vendor shortlists for backup software. Veeam offers rich functionality and many simple recovery options for the VMware and Hyper-V environment. Veeam continues to stand out with numerous agentless VM recovery options and unique functions to overcome hypervisor-native limitations. For the last several years, Veeam has been — and continues to be — one of the fastest-growing companies in the backup industry.”
The Visionaries two.jpg

The Visionaries

“Visionaries are forward-thinking, advancing their portfolio capabilities ahead, or well ahead, of the market, but their overall execution has not propelled them into being Challengers or possibly Leaders,” Gartner says. “These vendors are predominantly differentiated by product innovation and perceived customer benefits, but they have not achieved solution completeness, or sustained broad sales, marketing and mind share success, or demonstrated continued successful large-enterprise deployments required to give them the higher visibility of Leaders.”
Actifio.jpg

Actifio

“Actifio first came to market as a data virtualization appliance with its pioneering copy data management capability,” Gartner explains. “The concept of copy data collapsed the number of secondary copies of data (archive, backup, disaster recovery, test/development and so on) by keeping a single golden image of the data. Actifio successfully pioneered copy data management and delivers a single platform that integrates backup, disaster recovery and long-term data retention, but that can be used for broader data management, such as application development and facilitating multidirectional hybrid cloud deployments. Actifio offers scalable, writeable instant recovery for applications and virtual machines (VMs), including physical, as well as virtual, workloads. Customer and references praise Actifio's ease of use and customer support.”
Rubrik.jpg

Rubrik

“Rubrik offers an integrated backup appliance with a scale-out architecture that offers global de-duplication and ease of expansion,” according to Gartner. “Despite being a new entrant to the market, Rubrik has generated heightened market awareness and rapid adoption by upper midsize to large enterprises, augmenting or completely replacing mainstream data center backup solutions. Modern backup and recovery techniques, coupled with deployment, management and pricing simplicity, drive market adoption. Rubrik is aggressively expanding the support matrix to cover key production environments in the data center and the public cloud. Customers praise Rubrik's product reliability, pay-as-you-grow architecture and ease of use.”
The Niche Players two.jpg

The Niche Players

“Niche Players are specifically and consciously focused on a sub-segment of the overall market, or they offer relatively broad capabilities without very large-enterprise scale, or the overall success of competitors in other quadrants,” Gartner explains. “In several cases, Niche Players are very strong in the upper-midsize-enterprise segment, and they also opportunistically sell to the large enterprises, but with offerings and overall services that, at present, are not as complete as other vendors focused on the large-enterprise market. Niche Players may focus on specific geographies, vertical markets, or a focused backup deployment or use-case service, or they may simply have modest horizons and/or lower overall capabilities compared with competitors.”
Arcserve.jpg

Arcserve

“Arcserve offers two different backup products: Arcserve Unfied Data Protection (UDP), which is available as software-only and as an integrated solution via the Arcserve UDP Appliance, and the legacy Arcserve Backup offering,” Gartner says. “Arcserve UDP offers comprehensive backup, continuous data protection, high availability and disaster recovery for physical, virtual and cloud environments. References rate UDP high on ease of deployment. Arcserve offers a variety of packaging, deployment and pricing options, allowing customers to choose just the function that they need at a favorable price.”
HPE.jpg

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

“Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Data Protector is a software-only traditional data center backup product, typically deployed in conjunction with tape or de-duplication backup target appliances such as HPE StoreOnce and Dell EMC Data Domain,” Gartner says. “Data Protector is a single, scalable solution supporting a range of host environments, with some gaps, and offering native integration with many enterprise core applications, especially SAP. HPE Data Protector has good, heterogeneous OS, database and €le system support. Backup Navigator and Storage Optimizer provide analytics and visibility to the backup and storage environment. HPE is a good value from a cost perspective if the use case is traditional on-premises enterprise backup requirements.”
Unitrends.jpg

Unitrends

“Unitrends Enterprise Backup (UEB) offers a package of on-premises backup, backup to the cloud, cloud-to-cloud IaaS backup and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) via integrated appliances, virtual appliances or software-only offerings,” Gartner explains. “Unitrends focuses on delivering a backup appliance for the generalist IT administrator in the small to midsize enterprise. To ensure recoverability, Recovery Assurance available with the Enterprise Plus version provides fully automated, application-level consistency sandbox testing of physical servers, Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere VMs. This capability is available for on-site, Unitrends Cloud and service providers. Unitrends has a predictive analytics algorithm that can detect a ransomware infection.”
This story originally appeared in Information Management.