DCIG 2016-17 Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide

Here are abstracts of the DCIG 2016-17 Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide, written by By Charley McMaster, analyst, and Ben Maas, managing analyst, and based on a pool of more than 130 products in DCIG’s Backup Appliance Body of Research.

DCIG analysts ranked hybrid cloud backup appliances based on an evaluation of more than 100 different features. The 23 appliances from 6 vendors that met the inclusion criteria and achieved a ranking of Recommended, Excellent or Good are included in this guide.

Hybrid cloud backup appliances have emerged as a leading solution to incorporate cloud services into an organization’s backup and DR plans. The guide gives organizations insights into this important market segment.

Hybrid cloud backup appliances offer many benefits to organizations. Using these solutions, companies can more easily backup and recover applications on premise. Then, once the application data is initially protected, it may be replicated off-site.

Once the data is in the cloud, a number of hybrid cloud backup appliances give organizations new options for recovery. For example, a number of these solutions may host VMs either on the appliance or in the cloud with the cloud provider to do application recoveries.

Hybrid cloud backup appliances now offer sufficiently robust hardware and software to meet the data protection requirements of almost any size organization. The hybrid cloud model introduces, for the practical purposes of most organizations, the concept of an infinite cloud-based storage pool for backup storage and application recovery purposes. The support of one or more cloud providers by hybrid cloud backup appliances makes them a one-stop shop that potentially offers both onsite and offsite backup and recovery.

The regulatory environment around storage and security has become increasingly stringent and more complex. National laws and industry-specific regulations abound, especially with regard to personally identifiable information (PII). Thus financial, governmental and healthcare organizations may be understandably reluctant to store or recover private, sensitive information in the cloud.

Increased clarity about industry regulations, coupled with the maturation of cloud technology itself, may enable more organizations to confidently move ahead with their adoption of hybrid cloud backup appliances. Nevertheless, it is incumbent on each organization to match its regulatory data management requirements to cloud storage provider(s) certified capabilities. It is for these reasons that DCIG encourages organizations to thoroughly research their data privacy and retention requirements when selecting a hybrid cloud backup appliance and cloud provider.

Beyond understanding the regulatory environment, the greatest challenge now facing organizations may be sorting through the dozens of models available on the market to identify the right size model with the right options for their environment.

This is where the distinctions between appliances become critical. While their differences may be technical and maybe even seemingly minor on the surface, they can have a significant impact upon the success an organization experiences when using a hybrid cloud backup appliance in its environment. This is why DCIG evaluated more than 100 features on each product, including support for multiple hypervisors and cloud providers.

It is in this context that DCIG presents guide. As prior DCIG Buyer’s Guides have done, it puts at the fingertips of organizations a resource that provides them with a comprehensive list of hybrid cloud backup appliances that can assist them in this important buying decision while removing much of the mystery around how these appliances are con gured and which ones are suitable for which purposes.

Overall Rankings
(vendors listed alphabetically in each category)

Recommended Ranking

Commvault, STORSever and Unitrends products earned top rankings in this year’s guide. The eleven products that earned Recommended rankings include the Commvault A600, the STORSever A740-CV, A740-TSM, EBA 2802-CV and EBA 2802-TSM, and the Unitrends 824S, 933S, 936S, 943S, 944S and 946S.
 
Recommended products share the following features:
• Scale to offer high levels of cache, processing power and storage capacity
• May cluster multiple appliances together to create a highly available configuration
• All offer advanced capabilities such as auto-tiering and metering
• All support adaptive throttling based on consumed WAN bandwidth (compared to 88% at the Excellent grouping)
• Support VADP, multiple hypervisors, and vCenter for instant recovery
• Support scheduled conversions of existing physical backup to virtual (declines to 75% at Excellent ranking)
• All products through Excellent have P2P, P2V, V2P and V2V restores (compares to 50% at Good ranking)
• 82% offer connectivity to multiple cloud providers and 90% offer a proprietary cloud service
• 82% can create VMs on the backup appliance used to recover and host an application
• 73% have a virtual appliance edition
• 64% scale to more than 100TB with some scaling to more than 1PB

Vendors across the Recommended grouping revised and revamped their product lines since DCIG’s issued the 2015-16 Hybrid Cloud Backup Appliance Buyer’s Guide.

Commvault A600 earned the Recommended ranking in this year’s guide. It scales up from 24TB to 384TB raw (288TB usable) capacity. Four nodes can then be combined to scale out to a 1,536TB raw (1,152TB usable) capacity backup system.

Commvault
Commvault is well known for its data protection software. In the past, Commvault has partnered with backup appliance vendors to pre-install its Simpana backup software on their appliances. The Commvault A Series of appliances marks Commvault’s entry into the physical appliance market.

Commvault offers a full complement of VM capabilities on the local appliance. The A600 integrates virtualization on the appliances and in the cloud; and is able to recover and host applications. The A600 appliance leverages the full Simpana feature set for backing up both physical and virtual environments.

STORServer
Four STORServer products earned a Recommended ranking in this year’s guide. The STORServer A740 models provide 12TB to 480TB of raw storage capacity and up to four 10GbE and 8/16Gb FC ports. The STORServer EBA 2802 provide 40TB to 1.6PB of raw storage capacity double the port counts of the A740.

STORServer backup appliances are the only products in this guide that support 40GBE connectivity. They can handle from 1,500 to 2,500 concurrent backup streams, many times more than other products. The appliances also support more backup software, metering and management console options than the other products in this guide.

The STORServer products include software from either IBM (-TSM) or CommVault (-CV). Unlike some others, STORServer leverages both disk and tape for onsite backup while connecting to third party cloud providers – including Amazon – and STORServer’s proprietary cloud service for offsite backup, data recovery and operations.

Unitrends
Six Unitrends products earned a Recommended ranking, including the Unitrends Recovery 824S, 933S, 936S, 943S, 944S and 946S. Unitrends introduced new appliances including the Recovery 946S and 944S at the top of its lineup. These products use a combination of SATA and SSD drives for their OS, metadata lookup, and overall operational speed.

Unitrends is able to protect a broad array of virtual, physical and cloud-based servers and data, including the ability to instantly recover VMs and physical workloads to the appliance. Unitrends supports multiple cloud storage providers including AWS, Azure, Google and Rackspace. The Recovery 946S offers a fixed raw capacity of 182TB, 2.5x the capacity of the previous top-end model.

Unitrends offers cloud services through its Unitrends Cloud, leveraging VM capabilities that help to set it apart. Its DR as a Service is an add-on feature where VMs operate in a standby mode to serve as a secondary data recovery site, should the primary site go down. This enables data recovery and operations in the cloud. It also offers bandwidth throttling including time of day scheduling and QoS adaptive throttling.