BakBone NetVault upsets in Quality Awards, page 5
About the authors and the backup software survey.
Products in our survey
The following vendors and products were included in the 2006 Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Awards survey for backup and recovery software:
Enterprise backup software:
• BakBone Software Inc. NetVault
• CommVault Inc. Galaxy
• EMC Corp. NetWorker
• Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. OpenView Storage Data Protector
• IBM Corp. Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)
• Symantec Corp. Veritas NetBackup
• Syncsort Inc. Backup Express
SMB backup software:
• Arkeia Software Network Backup*
• Atempo Inc. Time Navigator*
• BridgeHead Software Inc. HT Backup*
• CA Inc. BrightStor
• ARCserve Backup
• EMC Corp. Retrospect
• Symantec Corp. Veritas Backup Exec
• Yosemite Technologies Inc. Backup Standard (formerly TapeWare)*
*Not enough responses to be included in the results.
About the survey
The Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Awards are designed to identify and recognize products that have proven their quality and reliability in actual use. The results are derived from a survey of qualified Storage readers who assessed products in five main categories: salesforce competence, product features, initial product quality, product reliability and technical support. Our methodology incorporates statistically valid polling that eliminates market share as a factor. Our objective is to identify the most reliable products on the market regardless of vendor name, reputation or size. Products are rated on a 1.0-8.0 scale, where 8.0 is the most favorable score.
Survey respondents
For this year's survey, 500 respondents provided 667 valid system evaluations. This yields a margin of error of +/- 4% with a 95% confidence factor. This pool of respondents was larger than in 2005 (465), but provided fewer system evaluations than last year's 775. Apparently, IT organizations are consolidating backup and recovery (B/R) application operations.
In 2005, only 35% of respondents indicated they had a single B/R application. In 2006, that number doubled to 70.8%. In fact, 90.6% of respondents indicate that they have two or fewer backup software products this year. The highest number of products in a single organization was nine, the same as in 2005.
About the authors
Rich Castagna is Editor-in-Chief of Storage; Phil Goodwin is president of Diogenes Analytical Laboratories Inc.
