The winners are ...We divided our field of 14 products into SMB and enterprise groups, and awarded Quality Awards to each. We recognize that many SMB products offer an "enterprise edition" and enterprise products offer a "workgroup edition," but we placed products into each group based on their most common deployments.
Based on the survey results, we're pleased to award CommVault Systems Inc.'s Galaxy with the Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Award in the enterprise backup product category and EMC/Dantz's Retrospect with the Quality Award in the SMB backup category. Retrospect ran away with the award in its group, outpolling the competition in every category. The tally in the enterprise group was tighter, with Galaxy winning the product features, quality and reliability categories, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co.'s OpenView Storage Data Protector earning top honors for sales force and product support (see the "Overall ranking" categories in the SMB backup software and Enterprise backup software charts). Underscoring CommVault's solid showing in the survey, one respondent notes, "The company I work for is currently replacing all instances of backup software installed with CommVault Galaxy." Another survey participant switched to CommVault because "the Tivoli support people were not able to make TSM's [IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager] Exchange agent work in our environment."
We also asked respondents if they'd buy the product they were using again. In the case of Retrospect, 81.3% of those surveyed said "Yes." CommVault Galaxy, our overall winner, actually placed third among enterprise products for this question with a respectable 78.6% indicating "Yes." Placing first and second were IBM's TSM and Veritas' (now owned by Symantec Corp.) NetBackup, with 84.8% and 81.8% of current users, respectively, stating they'd buy those products again. It appears that TSM and NetBackup have a high user loyalty, even though their overall ratings weren't as high as either Galaxy's or Data Protector's (see SMB backup software: Would you buy this product again?, and Enterprise backup software: Would you buy this product again?).
Arkeia Corp.'s Server Backup and StoneFly Networks Inc.'s Backup Advantage products were included in our survey, but we didn't rate them. Server Backup received only one response, while Backup Advantage didn't receive any.
