The most important criteria for choosing a backup solution include short backup windows, ease-of-recovery and role-based access management, according to IT Central Station, a peer review site for IT users.
Four of the top backup and recovery solutions on the market are Veeam Backup, Acronis Backup, HPE Data Protector, and IBM Spectrum Protect, according to online reviews by enterprise users in the IT Central Station community.
But what do enterprise users really think about these tools? Here, users give a shout out for some of their favorite features, but also give the vendors a little tough love.
Editor's note: These reviews of select data backup and recovery products come from the IT Central Station community. They are the opinions of the users and are based on their own experiences.
Veeam Backup
Valuable features
"Enhanced replication and failover plans. This is cool if you thought about buying VMware Site Recovery Manager, [because] most features of SRM can now be delivered by Veeam."
-- Oliver K., System Engineer at a software R&D company
"Features with the most value are Instant VM Recovery, SQL Explorer and Exchange Explorer."
-- Chris C., Infrastructure Architect
"The Backup Enterprise Manager is great as it allows me to see and manage all backup jobs from multiple backup servers."
-- Keith P., Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company
Room for improvement
"It still doesn't feel like a fully mature solution because it's not exactly ready for very large-scale and complex environments with more than 1000 VMs."
-- Mihai L., System Administrator at a tech services company
"Although this product is technically designed for virtual environments, it would be very useful if the same concepts or technology [were] applied to backing up physical servers."
-- Schneider K., IT System Engineer at a tech services company
"There are some features that are lacking compared to other backup solutions, specifically [related to] the use of tape libraries, and this is the largest area for improvement."
-- Dennis S., Information Technology Manager at a financial services firm
You can see more Veeam user reviews on IT Central Station.
Acronis Backup
Valuable features
"I found the Acronis True Image [to be the] best solution for backup and recovery, and [the] optimum tool for any HDD [hard disk drive] cloning."
-- Kashiffc., Senior Manager of IT at a non-profit
"Boot and backup any volume, regardless of OS, image or file recovery; and database recovery, including mailbox, universal restore."
-- Dan G., Senior Network Administrator at a tech services company
Room for improvement
"Domain Controller HDD image created through Acronis might pose problems like rejoining of the client PC to domain."
-- Kashiffc., Senior Manager of IT at a non-profit
"MS Exchange and SQL backups are a little slow and odd to set up. But once set up they do work, including transaction logs."
-- Dan G., Senior Network Administrator at a tech services company
You can see more Acronis Backup reviews on IT Central Station.
HPE Data Protector
Valuable features
"Our primary use is for disaster recovery, but the most frequent use is the restore function, when a user accidentally deletes a file or two. Being able to restore the files quickly is extremely important."
-- Jason H., Systems Administrator at an aerospace/defense firm
"A few of the most valuable features for us are backup and restore, the SQL databases, and the Exchange and VM's on tape libraries and disks."
-- Ales G., Systems support and operations manager at a retailer
"The most valuable feature for us is the central, single pane of glass that allows us to manage our clients without having to log into their systems. It's a really good feature for us."
-- StorageAdmin640, Storage Administrator at a tech services company
Room for improvement
"The [user interface] dates back to a very historic past. They need to bring it into this decade. Easy to say -- difficult to do."
-- MngTechInfra007, Manager of Technology Infrastructure at a financial services firm
"Every new version of the product has lots of bugs and we continue applying new patches in order to fix the bugs from the newly-installed versions."
-- Milan L., Global IT Operations at a manufacturing company
"Reporting is definitely an area for improvement, as well as scheduling and the way that pools are created and grouped. Some of these are fixed in version 9."
-- Rob Z., Backup & Recovery specialist at a manufacturing company
You can see more HPE Data Protector reviews on IT Central Station.
IBM Spectrum Protect
Valuable features
"Incremental Forever backups, enterprise management, journal-based backups, policy based, copy storage pools, deduplication and node replication. Also the extreme flexibility and scalability the product offers - most of it done without interrupting production at all."
-- Carsten P., CTO at a tech services company
"Very reliable backup and recovery system. If you have SAN on the back-end housing TSM's storage pools, you can achieve blazing fast restore times."
-- SrSystemsEngineer520, Senior Systems Engineer at a healthcare company
Room for improvement
"When there are too many clients connecting at the same time, or the platform does not meet requirements."
-- Carsten P., CTO at a tech services company
"With deduplication turned on, you need to be careful about how you scale server ratio to clients. Dedupe takes more [database] space and processing time."
-- SrSystemsEngineer520, Senior Systems Engineer at a healthcare company
You can see more IBM Spectrum Protect reviews on IT Central Station.
This story, "Backup and recovery tools: Users identify the good, bad, and ugly" was originally published by Computerworld.