BakBone NetVault placed first in the enterprise category, besting
better known backup software applications such as Symantec Veritas
NetBackup, EMC NetWorker and IBM TSM in the latest Diogenes
Labs–
Storage magazine Quality Awards survey.
Backup and recovery can often seem like eating your vegetables: You
know you have to do it, but you don't have to like it. Among all of
the product categories surveyed for the Diogenes
Labs–
Storage magazine Quality Awards, backup and recovery
(B/R) has generated the lowest overall scores. User satisfaction
apparently remains elusive, as our 2006 survey yielded even lower
scores than the 2005 edition. There's also a greater separation
between the top and bottom scores, and one out of three respondents
wouldn't make the same purchase decision today if they could do it
again.
Perhaps the relative antipathy toward B/R is the result of the
attention it requires.
"There's no backup solution in the world that doesn't require
daily intervention," said Lynn Haueter, senior systems engineer at
Alliance Coal LLC, Tulsa, Okla. "It's not a ship that you can put
on autopilot."
But not all of the B/R survey results are bleak, as three
products significantly increased their scores compared to last
year. BakBone Software Inc.'s NetVault, which came in near the
bottom in 2005 with a weak 4.60 overall score, was a surprise
enterprise-class winner this year with a strong 5.97 (see the
"Overall rankings" section of the "Rankings of enterprise backup
and recovery software" chart). NetVault's score surpassed last
year's winner, CommVault Inc.'s Galaxy, even though Galaxy's score
improved from 5.32 to 5.59 (second place). Hewlett-Packard (HP)
Co.'s OpenView Storage Data Protector fell from second place to
third with a 5.13. IBM Corp.'s Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM),
Symantec Corp.'s Veritas NetBackup and EMC Corp.'s NetWorker—which
combined control the majority of the B/R software market—all
finished in the bottom half of the finalist group. TSM's 5.04,
Veritas NetBackup's 4.68 and NetWorker's 4.66 were all slight
declines compared to last year's scores. Syncsort Inc.'s Backup
Express didn't have enough responses to be statistically valid, but
it still wouldn't have been a contender based on the responses it
received. CA Inc.'s BrightStor Enterprise Backup was not included
in the 2006 survey because the company discontinued new sales of
the product a year ago.
In the small and midsized business (SMB) category, Symantec's
Veritas Backup Exec placed first (5.14), narrowly edging out last
year's winner, EMC Retrospect (5.12) (see the "Overall rankings"
section of the "Rankings of SMB backup and recovery software"
chart). In the closest competition of any category thus far,
Veritas Backup Exec won three categories while Retrospect snared
two. Veritas Backup Exec's overall score in this category improved
from a 4.99 in 2005, while Retrospect's fell from a 5.42. CA
BrightStor ARCserve Backup fell from a slightly positive rating of
4.58 in 2005 to a negative satisfaction rating of 3.93 in 2006.
Arkeia Software's Network Backup, Atempo Inc.'s Time Navigator,
BridgeHead Software Inc.'s HT Backup and Yosemite Technologies
Inc.'s Backup Standard (formerly TapeWare) were included in the
survey, but didn't get enough responses to be statistically
valid.
Fig. 1: Rankings of enterprise backup and recovery
software
How much with how many
For 2006, we also asked how much storage was backed up by
respondents and how many administrators they used. Out of the 442
respondents who supplied this information, 131 (30%) use two
administrators, while 357 (80.1%) use five or fewer. Of the 25
organizations that use 20 or more administrators, most were in the
financial or IT services industries.
We were curious to see which backup software product could lay
claim as the "heavy lifter" of the industry. We defined heavy
lifting as a workload greater than 20 terabytes (TB) backed up.
Based on this criterion, IBM's TSM hoists the most bytes, with
54.6% of respondents using it to back up more than 20 TB. It's
followed by Veritas NetBackup (43.3%), EMC NetWorker (31.4%), HP
Data Protector (28.8%), CommVault Galaxy (28.5%) and BakBone
NetVault (7.7%). However, Veritas NetBackup had the largest number
of respondents (21.4%) using it to back up more than 100 TB vs.
TSM's 19.6%. NetVault, the enterprise category winner, had no
respondents using it to back up more than 50 TB. Among SMB
products, more than 80% of respondents use the products to back up
less than 10 TB. Two Veritas Backup Exec respondents and one CA
BrightStor ARCserve Backup respondent indicated they use these
products to back up more than 100 TB; there were no respondents
using EMC Retrospect for more than 20 TB.
Recent market hype regarding disk-to-disk backup prompted us to
ask which backup software applications are used for this function.
It came as no surprise that IBM's TSM had the largest number of
such users (84.5%), as disk staging is part of its basic
architecture. "It does it really well," said Alliance Coal's
Haueter of TSM's disk-based backup prowess. But we were surprised
that CommVault Galaxy was almost as high (81%), while products like
Veritas NetBackup and EMC NetWorker were relatively low (49.7% and
34.3%, respectively). We were also surprised to see EMC Retrospect
used for disk backup by 57.1% of its users, a high percentage for
the SMB group.
"We were switching from backup to tape, to disk-to-disk-to-tape
backup," said Keith Price, system administrator at Johnson &
Wales University in Providence, R.I. "Since we were doing a
significant redesign, we went through and did a full investigation
into which product would work best for us."
That re-evaluation resulted in replacing Veritas NetBackup with
CommVault Galaxy. "They [CommVault] came out better priced and
seemed to be a better product," Price said.
BakBone the overall winner, but beaten out by CommVault on
product features:
Page 2.