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In the daily news, we see disasters all too frequently: hurricanes, fires, floods, earthquakes, transportation accidents … it’s a sad and lengthy list. Data centers and their IT systems also face disasters on occasion, whether due to a system malfunction, a nasty hacker, a physical disaster or human error. All these things need to be repaired and the data and contents restored to usability, or else the business suffers tremendously.
A complete and reliable restore of a data loss incident is not an easy thing to accomplish; it takes both skill and experience. So 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.
For this article, eWEEK referenced a number of industry resources, including TechnologyAdvice, Gartner Peer Reviews, G2 Crowd, IT Central Station and eWEEK’s own resources. This listing is in no particular order.
Veeam Backup & Replication
Baar, Zug, Switzerland
Value proposition for potential buyers: Veeam Software 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.
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.
Currently, Veeam has more than 3,600 employees worldwide and offices in more than 30 countries.
Key values/differentiators:
- From a review by a professional in IT Central Station: “Stable, scalable, and affordable.”
- From another professional 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.”
- IT Central Station: “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.”
- 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
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 is 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 the option to configure a new backup job and also restoration from backup.
- Backups can begin instantly or be scheduled.
- Provides daily reports on all jobs.
Who uses it: storage administrators, small to large enterprises
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
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
IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery
Armonk, N.Y.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Big Blue utilizes its cloud-native capabilities and the relative low cost of IBM Cloud Object Storage for an automated, application-consistent backup and recovery solution. Storage solutions like this one for storage data protection and cyber resilience ensure continuity of operations, better performance and lower infrastructure costs. They simplify virtual machine, application and container backup and recovery, which improves storage efficiency and provides data isolation throughout a hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Key values/differentiators:
Benefits of IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery, according to the company, include:
- backups can begin instantly or be scheduled.
- provides daily reports on all jobs.
- maximized business uptime
- ease of use when dealing with exponential data growth and new workloads
- quick recovery in the event of a cyberattack
- improved analytics and development
Who uses it: storage admins, CTOs, security admins
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service, hardware appliance if needed
Commvault
Tinton Falls, 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:
Commvault’s product portfolio is built around four core offerings:
- Complete Backup & Recovery
- recognized solution for backup and recovery on-premises and in the cloud
- modern infrastructure that supports greater speed and flexibility
- scalable, modern, protected, compliant
- optimized for low complexity, cost and risk
- HyperScale
- on-premises scale-out backup and recovery
- delivered as a converged appliance, through a partner network
- offers cloud-like agility, greater end-user efficiency, improved hardware utilization, seamless scalability, more secure data protection
- Orchestrate
- provision, sync and migrate data across environments
- improves speed of disaster recovery, DevOps, testing and workload migration capabilities
- adaptable, flexible, simple and automated
- Activate
- helps users know, manage and use data
- insights that deliver better business outcomes, data governance and eDiscovery readiness
- analyzes data from backups, detect and manage unstructured data and ultimately extend data value
Summary: Together, these provide a complete, data center-to-endpoint, on-premises and in-the-cloud solution. Commvault protects, manages, extends enterprise data and goes well beyond a traditional backup vendor.
Who uses it: storage administrators, small to large enterprises
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
Cohesity
San Jose, Calif.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Cohesity claims to eliminate mass data fragmentation by consolidating data silos and workloads onto a single, easy-to-manage multicloud platform. The Cohesity Helios platform helps customers radically simplify data management, protect their data, and attain a competitive business advantage in a hybrid-cloud era. The company’s data backup, restore, and disaster recovery offerings include:
Cohesity DataProtect offers comprehensive protection for both traditional and modern data sources. It converges the capabilities of multiple point-products into a single solution that can be deployed on-premises or consumed as a service. DataProtect’s immutable backup snapshots combined with its unique capability to instantly restore at scale helps enterprises defend against sophisticated ransomware attacks.
Cohesity SiteContinuity delivers automated disaster recovery failover and failback orchestration. It helps enterprises achieve near-zero downtime and data loss. When paired with Cohesity DataProtect, it protects applications across tiers, service levels, and locations. This integrated solution helps companies ensure data isn’t lost, applications are available, and that strict service-level agreements (SLAs) are consistently met.
Key values/differentiators:
- Easy to manage: See and control your data across all locations (data center/edge/cloud) from a single UI.
- Rapid recovery: The platform maintains fully hydrated backup snapshots that, combined with its web-scale architecture, helps to instantly recover at scale.
- Unlimited scale: Hyperscale architecture easily keeps pace with your business data growth.
- Integrated cybersecurity: Multi-factor authentication, role-based access control, in-flight and at-rest encryption, snapshot immutability, and WORM work in concert to keep your data safe.
- Optimized for Efficiency: Eliminate costly data copies with zero-cost clones.
- Built-in Machine Learning: ML-powered recommendations to streamline operations and defend against ransomware.
From Gartner Peer Reviews: “The Cohesity Team listened to our budget and was able to come up with solutions tailored to our individual infrastructure.”
From Peer Reviews: “Cohesity SRE is not only limited to their product but very knowledgeable with switches, Linux, and other technology that integrates with Cohesity. They are willing to extend help just to make everything right.”
From 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
How it works: Primarily cloud service, but Cohesity also deploys solutions on-premises on qualified X86 appliances and virtualized environments, and on edge/remote devices.
Dell Technologies
Round Rock, Texas
Value proposition for potential buyers: Dell EMC backup and data recovery technologies are designed to protect data capital from edge to core to cloud. The company offers software and/or hardware packages for data backup (to a cloud or to an on-premises store) and data recovery for all consumption models–on-premises traditional infrastructure, virtualized environments and public, private or hybrid clouds.
Dell DataSafe Local Backup is a backup and recovery solution that can protect your operating system, applications, drivers, settings and important data including photos, music, documents, videos and more from data loss. In general, a full backup of a computer with 100 GB of data should take roughly between 1 to 2 hours if the hard drive is disk-driven, while it will take 10 to 20 minutes to complete in solid-state disk storage when you make a full backup of Windows 10.
Dell EMC aims to be a one-stop shop for data needs one and all, and backup and recovery is a key line item.
Key values/differentiators:
- Dell describes its Backup and Recovery 1.8 as a “safe, simple, and reliable” backup and recovery solution. It can protect an entire system (OS, applications, drivers, settings) and data (music, photos, videos, documents and other important files) from data loss.
- Depending upon the amount of data in each store, recovery from a disaster can take from a few minutes to several hours.
- Dell Backup and Recovery 1.8 comes in two versions, Basic and Premium.
- 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
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.
- From 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.
Who uses it: small to large enterprises, storage admins
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
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.
- From 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.”
- From 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
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:
- From 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 Peer Reviews: “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
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.”
Who uses it: medium to large enterprises with Oracle databases, storage admins
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
Zerto
Cupertino, Calif.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Zerto is a storage software vendor that specializes in enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) in virtual and cloud environments. Like all of Zerto’s products, Virtual Replication is hypervisor- and storage-agnostic, so it can be used across platforms.
Key values/differentiators:
- vSphere Replication replicates individual VMs within or across vSphere clusters
- Zerto works by running a Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) that ties into vCenter as a plugin and manages the replication stack and Virtual Replication Appliances (VRA), deployed by ZVM, on each vSphere host.
- By using the Zerto Elastic Journal and long-term retention you can restore a VM from secondary storage, and this VM can be old. Even 20 to 30 years old if you want–if you have enough secondary storage. In fact, the secondary storage’s main purpose is actually to archive those VM for longer periods.
- Zerto does not have physical workload support and is limited in terms of supported source workloads. Today only VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V are supported as a source. In theory, any physical or virtual machine could be replicated with ASR if the operating system is supported in Azure.
Who uses it: medium to large enterprises, storage admins
How it works: on-premises install or cloud service
Druva
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Value proposition for potential buyers: Druva started out about a decade ago specializing in protecting data on mobile devices, and it has continued to evolve into the cloud data protection and management space. Since those early days, Druva has become known as an early pioneer of edge-computing data protection.
Druva, along with its global partner, Wipro, came up with the concept of DMaaS, or data management as a service, a year ago, and it’s been a hit. Built on AWS, Druva aggregates data from endpoints, servers and cloud applications and uses the public cloud to offer a single pane of glass to enable backup, disaster recovery, archival and governance–dramatically increasing the recoverability, availability and visibility of business critical information, while reducing the risk, cost and complexity of managing and protecting it.
Recognized as one the industry’s fastest growing data protection providers, Druva is used by more than 4,000 global organizations, and protects more than 100PB of data.
Key values/differentiators:
- Druva expanded into data governance and compliance services in 2015. Druva’s market differentiator is that it offers a single platform that converges data availability—backup, restore and share and now comprehensive governance (compliance, archival/search and audit)—across entire end-user information on endpoints and cloud.
- Druva uses AWS as backbone to enable backup, disaster recovery, archival and governance.
- Simple, intuitive user interface that can be controlled from one device.
- LiVE Workspace provides enterprises with what Druva calls an “anywhere, anytime, any device” digital workplace. This aims to enable companies to offer their employees a choice when deciding which tools empower them to be more productive.
- 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 high quality.
Who uses it: medium to large enterprises, storage admins
How it works: cloud service
Other excellent providers in the category: Clumio, Infrascale, DriveSavers, Gillware, Seagate In-Lab Recover, SalvageData Recovery, Secure Data, Disk Doctors.