Don’t let backup get ‘interesting’, says Info-Tech

11 Jul 2012

If new trends in enterprise computing are making backup processes too complicated, it may be time for IT teams to evaluate new software.

“Backup is boring. It’s supposed to be boring, because it is a background function… and only becomes interesting if it fails,” says John Sloan, analyst with Info-Tech Research Group. At the same time, however, backup is too important to be ignored.

That puts IT professionals in a difficult spot. New trends in enterprise computing are conspiring to make backup more ‘interesting’, or just plain complicated, than most of them would like. Specifically, these are virtualisation, data growth and cloud and they are causing many IT teams to reassess the software they use to perform backup processes.

It’s the subject of a recent evaluation report from Info-Tech, Enterprise Backup Software Landscape, which explains why backing up enterprise environments today is so complicated and discusses which vendors are best placed to address different challenges.

First, it explains, virtualisation makes backup more tricky by creating a surge in host server workload density. Array integration complicates things further by blurring the lines between backup and continuous data protection.

Data growth, meanwhile, just means there’s more ‘stuff’ to backup. Here, deduplication, at the source and target, is becoming a commodity feature for backup vendors and capabilities for integration with storage will be a differentiator in 2012, says Info-Tech.

At the same time, companies are showing increasing interest in public cloud integration. If they plan to backup to a cloud service, they’ll need to know which enterprise backup software vendors offer this kind of integration – and who doesn’t.

In its assessment of eight backup software vendors, the research firm lists Symantec, CommVault and IBM as ‘market champions’, NetApp as an ‘innovator’ and also covers backup software from CA Technologies, EMC, HP and Microsoft.

Symantec, the report says, is strong in virtual machine protection capabilities and Info-Tech clients praise the vendor for its monitoring and reporting capabilities.

CommVault, meanwhile, offers ease of use and standout storage array integration. “With a comprehensive portfolio of data management and compliance products, CommVault maintains a strong reputation for customer support. Successful introduction of a capacity-based licensing option in 2011 helped simplify customers’ backup,” says Info-Tech.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is noted by the report to have extremely good scalability – with the most recent release enabling a single TSM server to manage up to four billion objects. While it is typically thought of as backup software for large enterprises, IBM is now focusing efforts on improving usability to make it accessible to smaller IT teams.

NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup, meanwhile, is singled out as innovative, because it is “an interesting solution that delivers extremely short backup windows and virtual restore times through tight integration with NetApp storage. One of its strong points is ease of use through a simplified GUI.

Info-Tech suggests that IT teams evaluate their backup software regularly. “Organisations that evaluate their backup software, but choose not to switch, are just as successful as those that have switched in the past 18 months,” the report says. “Don’t let a failure be your evaluation driver.”

One other piece of advice from the research firm: “Failure in backup is failure to meet recovery objectives. Always evaluate features in light of these objectives.”

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