2015-16 Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide – DCIG

The emergence of the cloud to alleviate cost, space and administrative burdens for maintaining full backup systems on-premises has led to the rise of backup appliances to provide the best of both worlds for data protection and DR. 

Hybrid cloud backup appliances serve as an on premise backup appliance and help maintain constant connection to a private or public cloud provider. As storage is a primary component to having a backup architecture, and cloud-enabled data centers managed by third-parties are becoming more common, users can point their backups to a cloud without having to install and manage additional racks of disk arrays, networking equipment and other SAN-related components.

The DCIG, LLC‘s 2015-16 Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide now available emerged from the success of the Integrated Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide when it became clear during that research that connectivity to cloud storage providers was of increasing importance. Hybrid cloud backup appliances provide a combination of onsite and offsite storage capabilities so companies can have their data onsite as well as offsite with a cloud provider. The offsite storage is used for data recovery purposes and even for disaster recoveries. These options make hybrid cloud backup appliances an attractive alternative for many organizations as opposed to setting up a dedicated secondary site to store their data or perform disaster recoveries.

“Advances by hybrid cloud backup providers with robust integration with cloud providers, help organizations do more than simply backup data to the cloud. They can now even recover and, or, fail over and run their operations in the cloud, in some instances for prolonged periods of time,” said Charley McMaster, research analyst and co-author of the guide. “It has and always will be important to provide users with a way to quickly identify solutions that they will want to bring in-house and provide further evaluation. This Guide does just that by giving purchasers with an easy to use yet detailed view of hybrid cloud backup appliances.”

DCIG evaluated nearly 60 offerings from ten companies. After an initial survey containing more than 100 questions was completed, product capabilities were assessed based on data provided by the vendor, prior DCIG research, and information available in the public domain. Products were then evaluated and ranked Best-in-Class, Recommended, Excellent, Good, or Basic across functionality and capability relative to the other products included in the guide.

The intent for this guide, as with all DCIG buyer’s guides, is to provide an ‘at-a-glance’ comparison from which organizations can select the most appropriate solution for their backup needs.

DCIG 2015-16 Hybrid cloud Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide Top solutions
include in alphabetical order:

• Cobalt Iron Vault – Enterprise,
• Cobalt Iron Vault – Large,
• Cobalt Iron Vault – Medium,
• Cobalt Iron Vault – Small,
• STORServer BA 601-CV,
• STORServer BA 701-TSM,
• STORServer BA 801-CV,
• STORServer BA 802-TSM,
• STORServer EBA 1202-CV,
• STORServer EBA 1202-TSM,
• STORServer EBA 2502-CV,
• STORServer EBA 2502-TSM,
• STORServer EBA 3502-TSM,
• Symantec NetBackup 5230,
• Unitrends Recovery 713S,
• Unitrends Recovery 714S,
• Unitrends Recovery 814S,
• Unitrends Recovery 823S,
• Unitrends Recovery 824S,
• Unitrends Recovery 933S, Unitrends Recovery 936S,
• Unitrends Recovery 943S

The Unitrends Recovery 943S appliance achieved the highest ranking in this guide by scoring particularly well in both the virtualization and management categories. The Unitrends Recovery 943SIt stood out in several ways from competitive solutions listed.

They include:

• Heightened levels of virtual server data protection capabilities as well as integration with multiple cloud storage providers into the appliance.
• Appliances scale to offer high levels of cache, processing power and storage capacity
• May cluster multiple appliances together to create a highly available configuration
• Offer SSDs as a storage option
• Provide robust encryption options for data at-rest and in-flight
• Support for dozens of OSs
• Support multiple storage networking protocols

DCIG 2015-16 Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide achieves following objectives:

• Provides an objective, third party evaluation of hybrid cloud backup appliances that evaluates their features from an end user’s perspective
• Ranks features of each hybrid cloud backup appliance on criteria that matter most to end users
  appliances so organizations may do quick side-by-side comparisons of products
• Gives any organization a solid foundation for getting competitive bids from different providers that are based on ‘apples-to-apples’ comparisons

“DCIG sees a bright future for hybrid cloud backup appliances. Many SMEs are already reaping the benefits of mitigating, and in some situations, negating the need to lease or purchase a second site to backup and recover data,” added Tim Anderson, managing analyst and co-author of the guide. “As these enterprises rely upon a cloud provider or many providers to offer viable DR plans for their organization, we know this Guide will be as valuable in helping users determine which is the right solution to bring in-house for further testing and evaluation.“

Disclosure and Methodology
DCIG identified nine companies that provide hybrid cloud backup appliances. Each hybrid cloud backup appliance had to meet the following criteria:

• Must be available as a physical appliance
• May ship as a virtual appliance
• Stores backup data on the appliance via on premise DAS, NAS or SAN-attached storage
• Enables connectivity with at least one cloud-based storage provider for remote backups and long-term retention of local backups in a secure/encrypted fashion
• Offers multiple layers of storage efficiency deduplication/compression) and HA (multiple nodes)
• Provides the ability to connect the cloud-based backup images on more than one geographically dispersed appliance
• Includes backup and recovery software that enables seamless integration into an existing infrastructure
• Includes support for both physical and virtual client based backup and recovery
• Includes support for standard application level backups (Exchange, Oracle, MSSQL, SharePoint, etc…)
• Sufficient information provided to reach meaningful conclusions
• Must be available by May 31, 2015

No vendors, whether clients or not, for this guide or previous guides, were afforded preferential treatment. All research was based upon information provided directly by vendors, research and analysis by DCIG and other publicly available information and all results solely reflect the opinion of DCIG.

As with all guides, they are not intended to be a substitute for internal testing nor was any product testing completed. DCIG encourages any organization that is considering the purchase of any solution included in a guide to do its own in-house testing.