DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of its DCIG 2014-15 Integrated Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide. In this Buyer’s Guide, DCIG weights, scores and ranks over 70 integrated backup appliances respectively from 14 different providers. Like all previous DCIG Buyer’s Guides, this Buyer’s Guide provide the critical information that all size organizations need when selecting an integrated backup appliance as these appliances provide one of the most appealing ways for users to simplify backup using a single box.
Integrated backup appliances have already been proven successful. But as this latest generation of appliances in this Buyer’s Guide illustrate, organizations can expect an even better experience from backup appliances going forward. More deduplication options, heightened support for virtualized environments, new alliances between hardware and software providers and increased emphasis on providing more tightly integrated support from a single provider are just some of the new features that these appliances boast.
Other areas where organizations will also see changes in backup appliances from the previous DCIG Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide include:
- Backup appliances make better use of solid state drives (SSDs) which contribute to increases in throughput and performance.
- Large providers like Dell have shed its alliances with traditional backup software providers such as CommVault and Symantec in favor of creating its own line integrated backup appliances that only use Dell hardware and software.
- Shunned by Dell, Symantec and CommVault have adapted to this new world of backup appliances. Symantec now develops and markets its own line of appliances while in the last quarter of 2013 CommVault aligned with STORServer, the winner of the previous DCIG 2012 Backup Appliance, to create a compelling new line of backup appliances.
One key differentiator witnessed in the research for this Buyer’s Guide is that providers are strengthening their offerings with services. As organizational needs increase, providers are bulking up their support and technology support teams to meet their heightened expectations for faster response times and quicker resolutions to the challenges they face.
It is in this context that DCIG presents its 2014-15 Integrated Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide. As prior Buyer’s Guides have done, this Buyer’s Guide puts at the fingertips of organizations a comprehensive list of integrated backup appliances and the features they offer in the form of detailed, standardized data sheets that can assist them in this important buying decision.
The 2014-15 Integrated Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide accomplishes the following objectives:
- Provides an objective, third-party evaluation of currently available integrated backup appliances that evaluates, scores and ranks them from an end-user’s perspective
- Includes recommendations on how to best utilize this Buyer’s Guide
- Provides standardized data sheets for each of the 72 integrated backup appliances from 14 different providers so organizations may do a quick comparison of features while having sufficient detail at their fingertips to make an informed decision
- Provides insight into each integrated backup appliance’s robustness of its hardware, what deduplication options it offers, and what levels of support and integration it offers for various backup software solutions
The DCIG 2014-15 Integrated Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide Top 10 solutions include (in alphabetical order):
- STORServer EBA2202-CV
- STORServer EBA1202-CV
- STORServer EBA3202-TSM
- STORServer EBA801-CV
- STORServer EBA2202-TSM
- STORServer EBA1202-TSM
- STORServer EBA802-TSM
- Unitrends Recovery 943
- Unitrends Recovery 863
- Unitrends Recovery 824.
Only one product of the 72 integrated backup appliances achieved the designation “Best-in-Class.” The STORServer EBA2202-CV has impressive scalability going past 1.4PB of disk storage and offers additional tape storage as needed. It led or finished second in all four major categories. The STORServer EBA2202-CV scored particularly well in the management and software categories, and tight integration with the CommVault Simpana backup and recovery software played a large part in pushing this integrated backup appliance to the top of this Guide’s scores and rankings.
In doing its research for this Buyer’s Guide, DCIG uncovered some interesting statistics about midrange deduplicating backup appliances in general:
- 97% provide the ability to protect the backup software on the backup appliance
- 92% support bandwidth throttling while replicating data
- 89% offer one or more options to do data deduplication
- 80% integrate with Microsoft Active Directory (AD)
- 67% can configure their backup software to run on a VM hosted on the backup appliance
- 52% support connectivity to a propriety cloud storage provider
- 51% can recover and run an application VM on the backup appliance
- 44% have a list price starting at under $10,0000
- 40% support automated storage tiering across multiple tiers of disk, including cloud storage
- 13% support Infiniband
The DCIG 2014-15 Integrated Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide is immediately available through the DCIG analyst portal for subscribing users by following this link.