Category: Disk Based Backup

CommVault – the #1 solution in Virtual Server Backup Software. STORServer – the #1 solution in Backup Appliances. Putting these two together would, on paper, create a very powerful data management and protection solution for organizations. Now it is no longer on paper but “for real.” Today CommVault and STORServer jointly announce the availability of a new series of STORserver backup appliances powered by CommVault Simpana that are poised to deliver a better backup appliance experience for organizations.

It can sound so easy to back up to the cloud. Just plug in a backup appliance and it does all of the work. While there is an element of truth to that, there are certain steps organizations should take to ensure they are getting the results they expect when implementing a backup appliance that backs up to the cloud. In this third and final segment of my interview series with STORServer’s Jarrett Potts, we discuss best practices for backing up to the cloud and recommend some steps that organizations should take to maximize backup and recovery times while minimizing costs.

The good news from an organizational perspective is that when looking for a backup appliance there is a wide range of them from which to choose. That is also the bad news. Having so many choices behooves organizations to first understand their particular needs before selecting a backup appliance.

Over the last few years backup appliances have emerged as one of the hottest trends in data protection. Yet with these appliances coming to prominence so quickly and so many of them now available from which organizations may choose, it is easy for us who have been in the storage industry to forget that many are learning about backup appliances for the first time. So today I’d thought I would dedicate a blog entry to explaining just exactly what problems backup appliances solve and then some factors to consider when selecting one.

DCIG has been producing Buyer’s Guides since 2010 and every time it produces one, new information comes to its attention. This information sometimes forces DCIG to adjust how it prepares a particular Buyer’s Guide to include how it scores and ranks products in it to properly and accurately reflect our findings. In preparing the 165-page DCIG 2012 Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide, DCIG encountered such an anomaly in that it felt compelled for the first time to introduce and assign an “Enterprise” ranking to one of the backup appliances covered in the Buyer’s Guide.