Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
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Technical support
The only vendor to post a score higher than 6.0 for technical support was CommVault with a 6.03 (see the "Technical support" section of the "Rankings of enterprise backup and recovery software,"
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PDF). Its highest score in this category was for the statement "The vendor provides support as contractually specified" (6.71). However, most other vendors also did well on this statement. The top score among SMB products in this area was Retrospect's 5.57.
Much of the user frustration about support is related to having problems properly escalated and getting support personnel equipped to deal with the issues. Daniels at Catholic Health East says it could be a hit-or-miss situation when he has a routine problem with EMC NetWorker, but bigger problems are a different story. "When we have really, really major issues they're really on point, on top of everything," he says, "and they're really quick to resolve the issue."
Being selective can also help you avoid support frustration. "There's a short list--a handful--of support engineers I know by name that I now ask for," says the Air Force Personnel Center's Stewart. "And if they're working on another case, I will wait for them to get free."
Support scores generally dipped for the statement "Support issues rarely require escalation," as well as for its companion statement "Support issues are resolved in a timely manner." Among the enterprise products, CommVault posted scores of 5.80 and 5.86, respectively. For SMB products, EMC Retrospect showed best in this area with scores of 5.21 and 5.43, respectively.
Buy again?
Our surveys also ask respondents if, all things considered, they'd make the same purchase decision today. In 2006, 67% of B/R respondents said they would. This percent dropped minimally to 66% in 2007.
Often, we find no correlation between these scores and the overall order of finish. However, this year there was a close correlation. Among CommVault users, 85.2% said they'd buy Galaxy again (see the "Would you buy from this vendor again?" section of the "Rankings of enterprise backup and recovery software," PDF). For HP, 84.2% of Data Protector users would buy again. The SMB group was led by Backup Exec's 55% positive response, which was very closely followed by Retrospect's 54.5% (see the "Would you buy from this vendor again?" section of the "Rankings of SMB backup and recovery software," PDF).
This was first published in September 2007
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