Old backup standbys show their strength in test

In our tests of nine backup-and-restoration products, those by Symantec and HP come out on top.

We tested nine products designed to relieve the longstanding drudgery of backing up enterprise systems and to take on the newfound challenges of securely and compliantly protecting data.

Among the candidates, we found that an old standby, Symantec’s Backup Exec, stands above the others for consistent backup and restoration in a variety of situations.

Symantec was followed very closely by HP’s OpenView Storage Data Protector, which has excellent core usability.

However, Acronis, Atempo, Avamar (bought by EMC during the testing cycle) BakBone and Yosemite Technologies made competition difficult, as each was able to accomplish server, client and branch backups and earned extra credit for usable security, audit trails and support for bare-metal machine cloning.

Much emphasis is placed in today’s backup world on specific applications. Transaction-oriented, high or rapid data-delta applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases, have a crop of products poised to provide high availability specifically for them.

The availability of application-specific data is accomplished through various methods that effectively mirror transactions into disparate computing hardware. This focus doesn’t seem to pay attention to the fact that enterprises often use a sophisticated mix of off-the-shelf applications and internally developed programs groomed to support a variety of operating systems.

Most of the backup products we examined have transaction application backup modules or suites available as extra-cost options. However, we did not test those options because this evaluation centers on testing several generic (meaning non-application-specific) backup applications in an emulation of a corporate site-with-branches environment (see “How we did it”).

Here is a chart showing a product-by-product breakdown of our testing: