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January 26, 2007
• Vol.29 Issue 4
Page(s) 9 in print issue
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Smaller Players In The Backup Market
Big Names Aren’t The Only Ones Making News
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 In the backup industry, a large chunk of the market belongs to Symantec (www.symantec.com), a company that brings together a number of services and security technologies. The vendor became a particularly major force a few years ago, when it acquired Veritas, a software developer that specialized in backup products.
But beyond the Symantec powerhouse is a host of smaller firms that are offering compelling backup options, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises. Here are some candidates worth noticing.
 CommVault
An increasingly strong contender in the backup market is CommVault (www.commvault.com), a company that went public last September and has since won major enterprise contracts, boosting its revenue over 40%. This rise in fortune could be good for SMEs because the company’s strength is leading to more development of features in its flagship line of products, QiNetix.
As part of that product family, CommVault offers Galaxy Express, a streamlined version of enterprise-level Galaxy Backup. What makes the small to midsized enterprise version unique is that companies actually have the entire codebase for Galaxy and can basically upgrade by getting a verification code to unlock additional features, says Dave West, CommVault vice president of marketing and business development.
Having the entire application available is very handy as companies grow, he notes, because they don’t need to do a major upgrade or change schedules for backup jobs. They simply unlock more features that immediately integrate into backup functionality already in place.
“More and more SMEs are dealing with how to scale up in backup as they grow,” says West. “It can be tricky because you want to layer more features on top without losing everything you’ve put in place. Galaxy Express can help customers do that.”
Dell users could benefit the most because the computer company has three Galaxy Express packages available: a Microsoft Small Business Server Edition, a file server edition, and an email and database edition.
EVault
A major trend in backup and recovery has been the evolution of managed services, which can be appealing to companies that don’t have the staff or expertise to juggle multiple backup technologies. EVault (www.evault.com; soon to be part of Seagate Technology [www.seagate.com]) has been working to make a name for itself in the increasingly crowded field, stressing its devotion to its SME customers and packing more features into its technology suite.
The company offers two services that are geared toward smaller enterprises: EVault Protect and EVault Small Business Edition (aka SBE). Both are online, automated disk-to-disk backup and recovery services and differ in how much can be stored in a specific timeframe. Protect stores up to 500GB of data for a year online, while SBE stores up to 30GB for one month online.
The company manages the data and applies encryption, but clients have control over how the data is handled, says Richard Heitmann, EVault’s vice president of product management. To attract more SBE and Protect customers, the firm frequently emphasizes its affordability and reliability, as well as the ease of use with its Web-based management console.
“The challenges SMEs face include limited resources and budget to maintain a reliable and cost-effective backup solution,” Heitmann says. “Customers want a backup environment that provides complete data protection safe from disaster and human error. Additionally, SMEs want to ensure their backup solution meets applicable compliance requirements and is scalable to their growing data needs.”
NetMass
Another vendor in the growing online backup space, NetMass (www.netmass.com) offers online backup software and a service that combine to make it easier to archive data. Called SystemSafe, the offering works when a company downloads the software and then uses the service to shuttle data to offsite data centers.
Although many SMEs are still weighing the benefits and drawbacks of keeping their data offsite at a third-party center, NetMass has seen a huge upswing lately in smaller companies choosing this type of outsourcing, says Stephen Perkins, the company’s president and CTO.
“Many SMEs have found that there isn’t one solution that meets everybody’s needs,” Perkins says. “So, they end up with environments where there’s a mix and match of technology, and that can be challenging to handle. I think that’s one of the reasons they’re choosing to just outsource the backups.”
The company could also interest SMEs for its recently launched ServerSafe CDP, a continuous data protection service that targets Windows, Linux, and Exchange servers. Perkins believes that the service is unique in its focus on saving SMEs money while understanding their specific backup needs, such as needing more data duplication or doing live backup.
Arsenal
Whether a company opts for completely outsourced backup or a mix of offsite storage and in-house management, one major trend has been a demand in more enterprise-level capability, says Brian Reagan, chief marketing officer at Arsenal Digital (www.arsenaldigital.com).
SMEs feel that they shouldn’t get applications or services that were originally created for large enterprises and then later “tailored” for SMEs. Sometimes, the development of these small business packages involves a slash-and-burn approach to features and can make an SME feel like some functionality is missing when they try to manage data.
In response, Arsenal has attempted to be the SME-friendly company and manage the tricky feat of packing enterprise-class functions into a more affordable, less complex backup application for smaller enterprises.
“Companies are looking for more integrated stacks of capabilities at a lower price point,” Reagan says. “In the past, to get more integration, you’d have to buy more. But it doesn’t have to be like that now.”
Arsenal’s pitch is that storage management can include backup but also blend together other functions, such as archiving and disaster recovery, without busting the budget. The company is also notable for offering a range of services, from tape- and disk-based backup to SANs, mirroring, online data backup, bare metal restore, and remote monitoring.
“SMEs have become more savvy about augmenting what they have already and filling in gaps,” says Reagan. “They can bring other elements into their backup plans and build a stronger data protection strategy.” 
by Elizabeth Millard
One To Watch: Yosemite Technologies
While some companies have created small to midsized enterprise products to go with their other software and service lines, Yosemite (www.yosemitetechnologies.com) focuses exclusively on the SME market, which gives it an advantage in understanding the needs of smaller enterprises. The company has been keen to create products that span from the desktop to the small data center and has a strong understanding of the issues that SMEs are facing, says Mitchell Cipriano, Yosemite vice president of marketing.
“The biggest challenge for SMEs is combining ease of use with value,” Cipriano notes. “More than that, there’s continually increasing sophistication about data protection, and SMEs are looking for products that can be more flexible.”
Yosemite specializes in backup products for environments running Windows, Linux, and NetWare and has seen favorable reviews for products such as Yosemite Backup Advanced, which has been praised for its ease of use.
The company should be worth watching not just for its product advancements but in terms of overall growth, considering that last October it appointed a new CEO, George Symons, who had been CTO for information management at storage giant EMC (www.emc.com). Responsible for defining EMC's product and technical strategy, he also played a key role in integrating Legato enterprise backup and recovery products into EMC’s product family. Having such a heavy-hitter at the helm, Yosemite has the potential to give even Symantec (www.symantec.com) a competitive challenge in the backup industry.
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SPONSORED LINKS
Arsenal Digital
A trusted provider of data protection services, delivering the broadest portfolio of fully managed, on-demand solutions
www.Processor.com/Arsenal
Lockstep Systems Backup for Workgroups
Disk-based backup software that lets you store backup data on any hard drive device: IDE, SCSI, SATA, NAS, USB, FireWire, etc.
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Netmass
“The safe data company” that specializes in online data backup and recovery solutions for businesses of all sizes
www.Processor.com/Netmass2
Yosemite Backup Standard Master Server Your first choice when deploying standalone backup servers, centralized client-server configurations, or true heterogeneous distributed backup environments
www.Processor.com/Yosemite |
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