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Pierre's top five backup products

What are the names of what you would consider to be the top five backup products?

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Unfortunately, there might not be as straightforward an answer to this pretty straightforward question. I could spend a fair bit of time praising the merits of each product, comparing architectures, features and performance. In the end, I would have produced a competitive advantage glossy similar to what most vendors already have.

There are numerous products out there fighting for market shares. In the end, they basically all do the same thing, sometimes with a different twist, sometimes with no difference worth mentioning. For many organizations, it has come down to choosing a backup product based on a single feature or a cultural fit (i.e.: Sun + Veritas).

Without wanting to bash the smaller players, I would personally make my backup software choice based on the importance of the installed base. Not to say that the most sold software is automatically the best. However, the more a product has users, the more you will find user groups, forums, cross vendor support, etc. Hardware vendors also tend to qualify the most popular software first.

For the above reasons, I would list my preferences (alphabetically) as being the following solutions, for both their features and their installed base: CommVault Galaxy, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, Legato NetWorker, Veritas Backup Exec and Veritas NetBackup.

Read W. Curtis Preston's answer to this question.

This was first published in June 2004

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