Vendors Watching Your Back(up)

Backup and recovery software is taking on a new look. Just about every major vendor that offers storage backup, replication and volume-management software has recently released new versions, many of which tie together with overall storage resource management (SRM) suites.

More specifically, this quarter CommVault Systems, Computer Associates, EMC's Legato, IBM's Tivoli unit, NovaStor, NSI Software and Veritas have unveiled or announced new wares that meld backup and recovery with storage replication and SRM. Likewise, those that offer backup and recovery appliances also have added new software that simplifies the deployment and administration of data recovery and business-continuity solutions. Among them are Adaptec's recently acquired Snap, Quantum and Overland Storage.

Even low-end solutions designed for basic backup of desktop PCs and portables are moving up the stack. Case in point: In October, EMC acquired Dantz, a leading provider of desktop backup software, which complements its Legato data-protection wares, and Symantec revamped its V2i Protector software, rechristening its LiveState 3.0. While Symantec is not the first company that comes to mind when talking storage software, the company acquired PowerQuest a year ago because business continuity and recovery fits into its overall strategy of providing customers uptime with security and systems-management tools.

At the enterprise and midtier customer levels, though, two fundamental shifts are occurring in the way storage software vendors provide data protection and SRM tools. First, over the past year, the widespread acceptance of ATA and Serial ATA disk technology has made them viable alternatives to tape. While not replacing tape as an archival medium, disk-based backup is now in vogue because it lets administrators recover data--typically content that is anywhere from days to weeks or even several months old--in near real-time while also reducing the amount of time it takes to back up data. This is a trend that has picked up steam this past year.

"I think we'll see just about everybody over the next 12 [months] to 18 months add some sort of disk-based tape-replication system," says Shane Robinson, CTO of Datalink, a Chanhassen, Minn.-based solution provider that specializes in storage and data protection. Notes Jim Geronaitis, vice president of product marketing for CA's BrightStor line, 80 percent of all restores come from data that may inadvertently have been deleted or corrupted from a virus or some other mishap. "Disk-to-disk gives you a high-speed restore," Geronaitis says.

The second shift: With the new crop of software, much of which is just hitting the channel now, comes the tighter integration of backup and recovery with data replication and SRM. That integration will make it easier for customers to administer backups and storage management, a key requirement among IT management given the lack of resources and time to spread out those tasks.

"The interaction between storage resource management and data protection is getting tighter all the time," says Bill North, IDC's storage software analyst. "While a customer might have people who are very conversant with data protection and people who are very conversant with storage resource management, those folks may not be the same folks."

Evolving Needs

Business requirements also continue to shift. While the post 9-11 world has brought newfound attention to disaster recovery and business continuity, the increased automation of paper-based processes is equally requiring customers to have better data-protection plans in their overall IT management hierarchies. Compliance, an oft-cited issue, is another requirement that is fueling demand.

In fact, only 38 percent of customers who have a disaster-recovery plan also have an integrated business-continuity plan, according to a study conducted by Market Dynamics that was commissioned by Veritas. The study also found that another 15 percent of companies with disaster-recovery plans don't have business continuity plans at all. That is especially the case among organizations with remote offices or companies in the SMB segment, which need to improve their data-recovery processes but have limited funds and personnel, notes Julie Parrish, Veritas' vice president of Americas field and channel marketing.

"One of the reasons they have not been investing in technology to back up their remote offices is it was viewed as expensive or complicated," Parrish says.

What customers want is a method to reduce the amount of human intervention required to manage backup, recovery and storage management, as well as a way to consolidate the head counts of staff and budgets. By streamlining management and processes, IT managers say they can also reduce the risk of human error.

"One way we can do that is to bring together the functions of traditional SRM and storage management, functions like backup and archive and that sort of thing, and link those so that we take the need for arcane knowledge out of the process and allow people at a less senior level to handle these tasks," IDC's North says.

Stephen Oles, managing sales director of Philadelphia-based VAR Cordicate IT, says the availability of replication software and high-bandwidth networks means branch managers at banks no longer need to spend their time changing backup tapes. "Bank managers' changing backup tapes just doesn't make any sense," Oles says.

Cordicate, which sells backup and replication solutions from Veritas and NSI, is seeing a growing number of customers investing in these solutions for the first time. Previously, they were not backing up their laptops and servers, Olesnotes. "These customers were losing laptops, losing information, and then they would scramble trying to find paper documents," he says.

Vendor Offerings

Many of the new backup, replication and storage management software tools are just starting to hit the channel. For example, Veritas' new Storage Replicator 3.0, which started shipping in October, shares a common interface with its popular Backup Exec software, a feature that should push the use of replication into a broader market. That common look and feel will help partners motivate customers to add storage replication to their overall data-protection processes, Parrish says. Replicator 3.0 costs $1,495 per server. Since making its push to increase its attach rates to Backup Exec in the SMB segment, Veritas has seen a 51 percent increase in revenue for Storage Replicator quarter-over-quarter, for the two quarters that preceded the current release.

"We have done a lot to help our customers and partners better understand the benefits of replication," Parrish says. For customers, the most obvious is more simplified backups and recoveries, while for partners it is the natural opportunity to upsell to a large installed base. According to IDC, the market for storage replication software is forecast to exceed $1 billion next year, up from $918 million this year.

While Veritas is a key player in storage replication, there's no shortage of choices. EMC's Legato division, for example, has added numerous modules to its backup and replication offerings (see "EMC Builds On ILM Portfolio," Nov. 15, page 70), while CommVault, CA and IBM/Tivoli all made similar efforts with new wares to bolster data-protection suites.

For example, with the release of BrightStor r11.1, CA has integrated its successful ARCserve Backup with the BrightStor suite. Given its success with ARCserve, CA is hoping its partners can bring ARCserve customers into the BrightStor SRM world. In addition to combining backup, the new release melds its SRM, SAN Manager and Vantage-SRM. Moreover, CA is providing integration with its Unicenter infrastructure management platform and its eTrust security suite.

"It's our first, truly integrated release across not only data availability and backup, but storage management," CA's Geronaitis says. The new BrightStor r11.1 app server release starts at $2,495, with optional modules priced accordingly. The ARCserver backup module costs $495.

For its part, CommVault has integrated such functions as backup, replication, archiving, hierarchical storage management, SRM and management modules into a common engine. The new Recovery Director in QiNetix 5.9 software also provides management of recovery-point objectives with recovery-time objectives. Recovery Director in QiNetix 5.9, priced at $5,000 per host, will allow customers to manage the two based on business objectives, while bringing together multiple disciplines including snapshots, replication and archiving.

"By culling this all together in a common engine, we provide the ability to monitor, track and forecast the movement of storage and data resources in a way that's almost impossible with standalone products," says Chris Van Waggoner, CommVault's director of product marketing.

Not to be outdone, IBM weighed in this summer with the TotalStorage Productivity Center, designed to automate and simplify manual storage-capacity planning and provisioning. The platform lets clients time-specify storage-provisioning tasks into automated workflows, which speeds up these tasks and reduces errors.