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Source: Gartner Research As the amount of storage being backed up continues to grow exponentially and tight budgets increase the importance of improving staff productivity and utilization rates, the following trends have become obvious: the move to enterprisewide backup/restore solutions; the ubiquitous deployment of replication technology; the deployment of SAN-attached tape and disk; and a renewed interest in HSM technologies that manage data growth and circumvent the architectural limits of Exchange. Comments on companies in each of the four quadrants follow. Leaders Quadrant: Veritas Software, IBM/Tivoli, Legato Systems and Hewlett-Packard (HP) are delivering products with broad server, tape and storage support, and with software agent support for popular ISV packages such as Oracle, Exchange, Notes, SAP and SQL Server. These products also offer consolidated administration, scalability, deployment flexibility and HSM options to improve storage utilization rates and staff productivity. Veritas and Tivoli are the current market leaders, delivering highly scalable solutions with good to excellent support. Veritas continues to lead the market with its NetBackup product, capturing enterprise backup leadership in 2000 based on new license revenue. Backup Exec is positioned as a workgroup product. Veritas leads in integration with all of the key storage array vendors' replication technologies, and the company offers the related data protection options that customers may require for a complete data management solution, including e-mail attachment archiving, HSM and Internet backup products. Veritas' competitors have made significant strides in filling the technology gap and, with improved execution, could still change their positioning in this quadrant, especially when Veritas' high pricing is an issue. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) still benefits from the large IBM sales force and partner community, although the delivery of new functionality has been late. Legato launched NetWorker v.6.01, which provides a new indexing architecture that has apparently addressed many of the code quality issues that caused customer dissatisfaction with earlier releases. The company has aggressively worked to move customers to the new release and has improved its customer satisfaction ratings. The new company management team has delivered modest, but steady, revenue growth, stabilizing the financial picture, but leaving improved marketing as the next challenge. NetWorker supports the Change Journal feature in Windows 2000 to improve the performance of incremental backups and minimize CPU utilization, the GEMS Console is now available for global management of NetWorker servers, and media management functionality has been strengthened through the acquisition and increased integration of AlphaStor technology from SCH Technologies. HP continues to successfully sell Omniback II into its installed base. Scalability and code quality problems that affected earlier versions of Omniback II appear to have been addressed with Omniback II v.4.0, although it must still be market-validated. The product is getting good ease-of-use and reporting rankings, now supports NDMP v.2, and offers a new instant-recovery capability to manage recovery from split-mirror images. Challengers Quadrant: To be in the Challengers quadrant, a vendor must not only have vision, but also the ability to become a significant player in the market. Vendors in this quadrant should be able to move eventually into the Leaders quadrant if they deliver on both vision and execution. EMC's EMC Data Manager (EDM) backup solution has seen strong growth, with an increased company sales focus, as EMC organizes for a stronger role as a storage software provider outside of the Symmetrix environment. One-third of the product's customer base does not have Symmetrix in the backup environment today, and 46 percent of the customers purchased the software only, not the hardware/software solution package (although a Symmetrix disk is required for staging of backup on the backup server). EDM is being integrated into the suite of EMC software management solutions, with the first and tightest integration being with the new EMC ControlCenter Replication Manager product announced October 2001. Computer Associates International (CA) has recently introduced its BrightStor Enterprise Backup solution, which has the look and feel of BrightStor ARCserve backup, a product that the company now positions as a workgroup solution. BrightStor reads and writes tapes that are ARCserve-compatible. This suggests an early focus on retaining ARCserve customers moving into enterprise-class solutions and on improving support capabilities, which have been a weakness in the past. The company is also looking to move the installed base of Alexandria and UniCenter Advanced Storage Option customers to the new BrightStor backup product. The product is new and without references at this time, but the vision looks good and CA has the resources to bring to bear on this market. Visionaries Quadrant: Both SyncSort with Backup Express and CommVault with Galaxy have strong product architectures, solid NDMP support, and about the same new license revenue volume, which remains too small to move them into the Challengers or Leaders quadrant at this point, but both are gaining increased attention in the customer and vendor communities. SyncSort has increased its investment in marketing, advertising and strategic-partner development, and this is beginning to pay off in greater market visibility, which must now be turned into more customers and a larger revenue stream. The company benefits from the profitable sort business, which can now fund the increased move into the backup market. CommVault Galaxy gained a lot of attention in the market when first released because of its Exchange agent, which supports individual message- and mailbox-level restores without making multiple copies of each message. Similarly, its Notes agent supports document-level restores. Other vendors now have "good enough" functionality in the message restore area or are promising it in the near term. Unlike SyncSort, CommVault has had to seek funding and has attracted some powerhouse investors, Microsoft being an obvious example, but it has yet to turn these relationships into significant revenue growth. Both vendors have strong products that they need to continue to improve, but growing the channel will be even more important for them if they wish to move into the Challengers quadrant. Niche Players Quadrant: Vendors in this quadrant have credible technology and have some visibility in the marketplace, as measured by Gartner client inquires. Atempo (aka Quadratec), with Time Navigator, is looking to move from being a European supplier (it is based in France) to more of a worldwide player. The company has opened offices in California and captured the contract for developing the NDMP agent to be included with Compaq Computer's StorageWorks NAS Executor servers. Compaq resells Time Navigator in Asia/Pacific. Atempo is looking to focus development on features that will make the product more appealing to customers running IT as a service, and it has delivered some features to that end, such as support for secure access through firewalls where necessary and role-based access controls. BakBone first released the NetVault product to the U.S. market in 2000, but it was based on technology selling in Europe and Japan prior to that. The product is currently the only one listed that supports NDMP v.4. Finding partners, finding channels and gaining market visibility remain challenges that are always more difficult to address than technology. Tantia Technologies’ (aka Harbor) Network Storage Manager's (NSM's) market penetration has been limited by its focus on mainframes, although the company recently released a Windows NT/2000 version of the product. The company offers a solid product for mainframe customers looking to back up open-systems servers. The new Windows solution should offer Tantia the opportunity to sell deeper into that base. Selling outside the mainframe environment will challenge the company to develop new channels. Kvedja/Regards Petur Eythorsson Taeknimadur/Technician IBM Certified Specialist - AIX Tivoli Storage Manager Certified Professional Microsoft Certified System Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nyherji Hf Simi TEL: +354-569-7700 Borgartun 37 105 Iceland URL: http://www.nyherji.is
