Continued from
Page 1.
Product features
You can consider product features to be the category where EMC
Retrospect stumbled and lost the award among SMB backup software
products. In a significant change, Retrospect's score fell from a
generally positive 4.62 in 2005 to a negative 3.97 this year. This
category was also Retrospect's lowest rated section in both the
2005 and 2006 surveys. Had the product achieved even a neutral 4.5
rating, it would have handily won the award for the second year in
a row. While Veritas Backup Exec's 4.81 was almost a full point
higher, it was one of that product's lowest category scores.
EMC Retrospect's score for this section was particularly hurt by
a 3.43 rating for the statement "This product is a complete
solution." But perhaps more damaging was that the product didn't
get a positive rating to any statement in this section, which
queried respondents on management functionality, and file-system
and database backup software features.
Products in the enterprise category fared significantly better
in this category. CommVault Galaxy bested BakBone NetVault for
product features, the only category in which NetVault didn't
achieve the highest score. CommVault respondents rewarded the
product with a 6.07, higher than last year's 5.77. Respondents
especially liked Galaxy's database backup, giving it a 6.24 for
"This product's database backup features meet my needs."
NetVault had its best rating (6.23) for "This product is
interoperable with other vendors." Sara Weylman, a SAN engineer at
a New York-based payroll processing company, is an IBM TSM advocate
in a Veritas NetBackup shop. She said that "there's nothing elegant
about it [NetBackup]."
Cindy Yoho, a systems engineer at a Nashville, TN, publishing
house, notes that the Nashville publishing house where she works is
only using CA BrightStor ARCserve Backup because of a single
shortcoming of HP Data Protector. "There is no Mac client," she
said. "That's the one thing that Data Protector doesn't do."
Alliance Coal's Haueter, another IBM TSM devotee, particularly
likes the product's disaster recovery (DR) features. "It prepares a
whole DR plan that tells you exactly, step for step, what process
you have to go through to rebuild your TSM environment," he
said.
Initial product quality
In the initial product quality section, we asked respondents to
tell us about their experiences when first using a product.
According to respondents, BakBone NetVault is the easiest product
to deploy among enterprise and SMB products. NetVault rated a 6.38
for "This product is easy to install," while CommVault Galaxy
placed second with a 5.55. The highest rated SMB product for this
statement was EMC Retrospect, which placed third overall with a
5.52.
Ease of use is another important consideration, especially in a
product category not noted for its easy operation. "I think the HP
product is a little easier to use," said systems engineer Yoho,
comparing CA BrightStor ARCserve Backup and HP Data Protector. "I
wouldn't call it as easy to use as Word," Johnson & Wales
University's Price said of CommVault Galaxy, "but I don't consider
it any more difficult than any other backup product I've worked
with."
We also wanted to know how users perceive the financial aspects
of B/R products. Often, the cost of media exceeds the cost of the
backup software itself. Therefore, we asked respondents to tell us
how efficiently the products use tape. In this regard, respondents
indicated EMC Retrospect as best overall (6.10). Among enterprise
products, CommVault Galaxy was rated the best with a 5.90.
We're always interested to see the responses to the statement
"This product offers good value for the money." Here again, BakBone
NetVault and Galaxy led the enterprise group with ratings of 5.85
and 5.79, respectively. These are relatively high satisfaction
scores for an often contentious issue that involves money. However,
the category ranges down to a "Dissatisfied" rating of 4.25 for EMC
NetWorker. Among SMB products, Veritas Backup Exec was rated higher
than Retrospect—5.01 to 4.62, respectively. Given that CA scored a
3.63 on this statement, it's fair to say that users aren't
overwhelmed by the value delivered by any of these SMB
products.
Fig. 2: Rankings of SMB backup and recovery
software
Evaluating backup software products over the long haul:
product reliability and repurchasing intentions, on
Page 3.