Virtual Server backup software ranked
CommVault Simpana and CA ARCserve top of the pops
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Analyst rankings of virtual server backup software put CommVault Simpana 9 and CA ARCserve r15 in place as the best all-round products.
The DCIG 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide is a collaboration between two analyst firms: Jerome Wendt's DCIG and SMB Research. They admit to paid assignments from some of the vendors whose products were reviewed, but say they were not paid to produce their report and it is an independent evaluation.
The analysts sent questionnaires to some 30 firms and received 24 replies. They classified the questions into various aspects of virtual server backup and recovery, weighted the replies according to user-related conversations, and scored the vendors' replies. The mean and the statistical deviation were calculated and vendors' products ranked on both the individual aspects and overall, with five rankings from Basic, through Good to Excellent, and then Recommended.
The highest recommended product was separated out as Best-in-Class and this was CommVault's Simpana 9 product with a score of 94. It was just one point ahead of CA's ARCserve r215, which was recommended because it scored more than 1.25 standard deviations above the mean.
In the Excellent category were six vendors' products (with scores in brackets): Arkeia Network Backup v9 (89); IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6 (88); EMC Avamar (87); HP Data Protector 6.1 (86), Symantec Backup Exec 2010 (86); and Quest's vRanger PRO 4.5 (84). Scores ranged from 0.5 standard deviations above the mean to 1.24 above it.
The Good category, ranging from 0.25 standard deviations below the mean to 0.49 above, had nine products identified. The Basic category had seven products identified, with scores more than 0.25 standard deviations below the mean. This bunch included Microsoft's Data Protection Manager 2010 and Seagate's i365 EVault Data Protection Software.
The 81-page report is freely available from CommVault's website, at a cost of providing sales lead-type information. ®
COMMENTS
Only vendors, not customers
It was 24 vendors, not 24 customers...AFAIK no customers were asked to participate, only vendors
response to Anonynmous Coward
Anonymous Coward, we most certainly did take a close look at both Veeam and PHD, as we consider each of these vendors to be very significant vendors in this market. As for asking the right questions, I am obviously not the best person to address this. I will tell you that one of the participants in the research - and not one of the highest ranked vendors - told us: "...there were a lot of very creative questions that took some great insight and understanding of the environment and problems within the VM backup space. Kudos to the people that put together the questionnaire!” reastman at smbresearch (dot) net
response to Michael C
Michael C: As one of the collaborators on this research, I don't quite understand how a response rate correlates to an error rate. The fact of the matter is that we went to great lengths to identify the players in the virtual server backup software market, and made contact with each of the major vendors with an invitation to participate. I am guessing that if every piece of research that did not get 100% response were never published, then there could be a lot of quite good research that would not see the light of day. We feel that this piece of research has some very good integrity and value.
I respect your opinion. I believe however that our research has some very good value to provide to vendors, end-users, service providers, and to the discussion of virtual server backup software. reastman @ smbresearch dot net
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