With all the scads of data companies are now collecting in their storage vaults and in the cloud, backing it all up so that it’s available when needed for any employee requiring it is one of IT’s most important functions. If an enterprise loses its data due to a system malfunction, physical disaster or human error, there must be a way to resurrect it, or else the company might as well call it a day.
How does a business select a data recovery partner? First, look at whether the vendor offers protection for data wherever it resides: data center, cloud service, personal devices–everywhere. Second, look at the reputation of the company; ask colleagues what their experiences have been with certain vendors. Third, look at the service-level agreement options vendors offer and determine whether they are right for you.
Fourth, ask how intuitive and time-consuming the data-restore process is. Finally, examine the security processes used by the potential partner; those will be used by you and your employees on a daily basis.
Here is a free report on IT Central Station that compares data backup and recovery products in the market.
For this article, eWEEK used a number of industry resources, including Gartner Peer Reviews, G2 Crowd, IT Central Station and eWEEK’s own resources. The listing is in no particular order.
Rubrik
Palo Alto, Calif.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Rubrik offers live data access for recovery and application development by fusing enterprise data management with web-scale IT and eliminating backup software. This marks the end of a decade-long innovation drought in backup and recovery, the backbone of IT. Within minutes, businesses can manage the explosion of data across private and public clouds.
Key values/differentiators:
- From a review in IT Central Station: “The most valuable feature of this product is fast recovery from the backup. Fast recovery is managed by attaching a disk where the backup is located. It’s immediately available to the customer who doesn’t need to wait for the system to recover the BKP from an archive.”
- Rubrik offers live data access for recovery and application development by fusing enterprise data management with web-scale IT.
- From installation to implementation to support, reviewers claim Rubrik is easy to use and deploy. The appliance takes less than an hour to set up and configure.
- It connects to all VMs and databases. Customers can use some of the built-in SLAs and create custom ones.
- Backups can begin instantly or be scheduled.
- Provides daily reports on all jobs.
Who uses it: storage admins, CTOs, security admins, savvy line of business employees
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service, hardware appliance
Score: 4.8/5.0
Veeam Backup & Replication
Value proposition for potential buyers: Veeam Software, based in Baar, Switzerland, builds backup solutions that enable intelligent data management for the hyper-available enterprise. Veeam launched its first product, Veeam Backup & Replication, in 2008 with a team of 10 employees. Today, Veeam is a global leader in Intelligent Data Management for the Hyper-Available Enterprise. Its most recent products include Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux, as well as Veeam Availability Console.
Currently, Veeam has more than 3,600 employees worldwide and offices in more than 30 countries.
Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform is a complete solution that helps customers on the journey to automating data management and ensuring the availability of data. Veeam claims its customer satisfaction scores, at 3.5X the industry average, are the highest in the industry. The Veeam global ecosystem includes 59,000 channel partners, Cisco, HPE, Lenovo and NetApp as exclusive resellers, and 20,600 cloud and service providers. Veeam currently has more than 320,000 customers worldwide, including 80 percent of the Fortune 500 and 58 percent of the Global 2000.
Key values/differentiators:
- From a review in IT Central Station: “Veeam has improved my organization by 90%. Now we can restore a single box with all of its folder contents. We could install one email, one folder or one lead and it could have still one email. This has helped us a lot. Before we used to store the entire database and then we would go to the single mailbox we need to use and we could restore it. Now we could do it instantly whereas it used to take three to four days.”
- The solution is very stable. Users report that it has worked well since they deployed it. It’s currently used daily. We do backups daily, weekly and monthly.
Who uses it: storage admins, CTOs, security admins, savvy line of business employees
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service, hardware appliance
Score: 4.8/5.0
Commvault
Jersey City, N.J.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Commvault’s data protection and information management solutions help companies protect, access and use all of their data, anywhere and anytime as a powerful strategic asset. Company established itself with respected backup product, Simpana. Simpana once won eWEEK’s award as software product of the year (2008).
Key values/differentiators:
- Here is a representative review in IT Central Station.
- The product integrates with almost everything, be it VMware virtual machines, SAN/NAS systems, tape robots, Windows servers, Linux, UNIX.
- Simpana can be linked with existing products using its own APIs or standard-based APIs.
- Once you know how the product works, deployment is not very complex.
- Support engineers usually respond the same day.
- The interface is a bit complex, and so is the licensing.
Who uses it: storage administrators, small to large enterprises
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
Score: 4.7/5.0
Veritas NetBackup
Mountain View, Calif.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Veritas Technologies develops and delivers backup and recovery, business continuity, information governance, and storage management solutions worldwide. It provides backup and recovery products that comprises system recovery solutions for protecting desktops, laptops, servers, and virtual machines as well as NetBackup appliances that provide backup and recovery for data centers, remote offices, and virtual environments.
Key values/differentiators:
- It supports almost all platforms and applications, including Windows and Linux file systems, SQL and VMware. For customers, there is a choice of up-front perpetual or subscription licensing.
- It is available in 3 editions: Bronze, Silver and Gold. Bronze is the most economic option. Silver offers the most-used features. Gold includes all the features and functionality available in Backup Exec.
- Management interface is simple, and if you are familiar with older versions of Backup Exec, then it is easy to use because there not much difference.
- Dashboard has the option to customize as per requirement. Job monitor tab is there to monitor the scheduled backup jobs and job histories.
- Backup and Restore tab gives option to configure new backup job and also restoration from backup.
- Here are several product reviews on IT Central Station.
Who uses it: storage administrators, small to large enterprises
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
Score: 4.7/5.0
Cohesity
San Jose, Calif.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Cohesity delivers the industry’s first hyperconverged secondary storage for backup, test/dev, file services, and analytic datasets. Cohesity makes data work for its owners by consolidating secondary storage silos onto a hyperconverged, web-scale data platform that spans both private and public clouds.
Key values/differentiators:
- Data Protection is reliable but that not the only use case; customers also use it for file sharing, testdev and analytics.
- Enterprise customers begin by radically streamlining their backup and data protection, then converge file and object services, test/dev instances and analytic functions to provide a global data store.
- Reviewer on Gartner Peer Reviews: “Cohesity Team listened to our budget and was able to come up solutions tailored to our individual infrastructure.”
- Reviewer on Gartner Peer Reviews: “Cohesity SRE is not only limited to their product but very knowledgeable with switches, Linux, other technology that integrates with Cohesity. They are willing to extend help just to make everything right.”
- Cohesity counts many Global 1000 companies among its rapidly growing customer base.
- Reviewer on Gartner Peer Reviews: “I recommend this product or at least check out what it can do to help you on your data protection challenges. And adapt new technology that does not only solve backup but also the rest of the secondary storage as well as native Integration to the cloud.”
- Here’s one of several peer reviews on IT Central Station.
Who uses it: IT managers, storage admins, CTOs, small to large businesses
How it works: cloud service
Score: 4.7/5.0
Acronis
Burlington, Mass.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Acronis claims to set a new standard for new-generation data protection through its backup, disaster recovery and secure access solutions. Powered by the Acronis AnyData Engine and set apart by its image technology, Acronis claims to deliver easy, complete and safe backups of all files, applications and operating systems across any environment—virtual, physical, cloud and mobile.
Key values/differentiators:
- Good for complex deployments in flexible and transient distributed environments.
- With its more than 50 patents, Acronis’ products have been named best product of the year and cover a range of features, including migration, cloning and replication.
- Connectivity and integration between on-prem and Microsoft Azure services are simple and powerful.
- Reviewer on Gartner Peer Reviews: “The product is so simple to use, very intuitive that very little training was required. The training we did get was fantastic … There is not a single aspect of the product capabilities that have not met or exceeded our requirements.”
- Founded in 2003, Acronis protects the data of more than 5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses in over 145 countries.
- Here is a representative peer review (one of several) of Acronis Disaster recovery on IT Central Station.
Who uses it: small to large enterprises, storage admins
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
Score: 4.6/5.0
Code 42
Minneapolis, Minn.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Code42 is climbing up the charts in data loss protection, visibility and recovery solutions. Native to the cloud, the Code42 Next-Gen Data Loss Protection solution rapidly detects insider threats, satisfies regulatory compliance requirements and speeds incident response—all without lengthy deployments, complex policy management or blocks on user collaboration. Security, IT and compliance professionals can protect endpoint and cloud data from loss, leak and theft while maintaining an open and collaborative culture for employees.
Founded in 2001, more than 50,000 organizations worldwide, including the most recognized brands in business and education, rely on Code42 to safeguard their ideas. Code42 has doubled its enterprise SaaS revenue year-over-year. Our customers include seven of the 10 world’s largest technology companies, 10 of the 20 most valuable brands, and seven of the eight Ivy League colleges and universities.
Key values/differentiators:
- The GUI of the Code42 console makes it less cumbersome than other products at finding the data you want to backup, on a specific date. The additional features (file exfiltration detection, and the legal hold) makes it more robust than some older data backup solutions, combining DR, compliance, and data recovery tools into one product.
- Reviewer on Gartner Peer Reviews: “The ease of use of this product is superior to our existing product. The interface is simpler to navigate, and I end up spending less time searching for and restoring the data I need. The frees up time for myself and the end user.”
- Reviewer on Gartner Peer Reviews: “I haven’t found anything that I’ve disliked about this product. It’s so much better than our existing data backup solution, that even if I did find something, it would pale in comparison to our existing product.”
Who uses it: small to large enterprises, storage admins
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
Score: 4.6/5.0
Kroll Ontrack
Eden Prairie, Minn.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Kroll Ontrack, Inc. designs, develops, and markets software solutions for legal, corporate, and government entities in the United States and internationally. Its products include Ontrack Engenium, an intelligent search and search-related solution; Ontrack Inview, a review tool for discovery services clients to perform online document review; Ontrack PowerControls software, which performs e-mail searches and exchange server recoveries; and Ontrack Eraser, an enterprise software tool that permanently erases data stored on computer hard drives to protect intellectual property and sensitive information when disposing, recycling, and transferring computers. Its products also include Ontrack EasyRecovery, data recovery software; a hosted online repository and interactive briefing software.
Key values/differentiators:
- Reviewer on Gartner Peer Reviews: “Kroll has helped us achieve some added features that our current backup/restore software couldn’t. They also support multiple versions of Microsoft Outlook.”
- Intuitive interface and easy to use navigation. Many options to choose from.
- Kroll Discovery has mastered relativity managed hosting and e-discovery services end-to-end.
- Has the ability to restore a single email from a Unitrends backup.
- From a G2 Crowd Review: “If you need software to recover you data that was moved, deleted or formatted on the storage device, Knoll Ontrack is the best and easiest way to archive your goal.
Who uses it: small to large enterprises, storage admins
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
Score: 4.6/5.0
Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery
Redwood Shores, Calif.
Value proposition for potential buyers: At a high level,Oracle is focused on moving out of the on-premises enterprise—and it’s in a lot of them—by engineering hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in the data center. By eliminating complexity and simplifying IT, Oracle enables its customers—400,000 of them in more than 145 countries around the world—to accelerate innovation and create added value for their customers.
Oracle’s ZDLRA (Zero Data Loss Recovery) is a long-established, many times-modified solution relied upon by a large number of users globally.
Key values/differentiators:
- ZDLRA is an easy to use, robust, “set and forget it” approach; it is software that users implement every day.
- Integrates into workflows easily and efficiently.
- Reviewer perspective: “We use ZDLRA as a solution for our data protection to eliminate the risks of data loss because it allows us to retrieve data to the last sub-second without impacting our IT environments. We have also been able to standardize our backup and recovery policies and track the integrity of backups in real time.”
- Here is a representative review on IT Central Station.
Who uses it: medium to large enterprises with Oracle databases, storage admins
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
Score: 4.5/5.0
Seagate eVault
Cupertino, Calif.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Seagate offers consumers and businesses data storage solutions to create, share, and preserve digital content. It designs, develops, and manufactures external and internal hard disk drives and associated software products. It sells its disk drives primarily to major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), distributors, and retailers.
The company produces a range of disk drive products addressing enterprise applications, where its products are designed for enterprise servers, mainframes, and workstations. It develops data-recovery products for a range of end user devices, such as digital video recorders (DVRs), personal data backup systems, portable external storage systems, and digital media systems. In addition to manufacturing and selling disk drives, it provides data storage services for small- to medium-sized businesses, including online backup, data protection, and recovery.
Key values/differentiators:
- Evault’s quick file scan and quick file scanning makes incremental backups faster.
- Application-aware and granular recovery of data is very quick and simple.
- Appliance data maintenance is good and has excellent visibility of data.
- Data deletion and managing the appliance data retention is good.
- Data optimization is good; deduplication function is very useful.
- Replaces digital tape storage for disaster recovery.
Who uses it: medium to large enterprises, storage admins
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
Score: 4.6/5.0