Product featuresB/R software products have been around for a long time, tend to be comparable and new functionality is incremental. Surprisingly, all of the major SMB products hovered near a neutral 4.5 rating in the product feature category--Retrospect had a modest 4.62 (the highest score in the category), while the lowest rating was a 3.25 for Yosemite Technologies Inc.'s TapeWare (see the "Product features" category in the SMB backup software chart).
In the enterprise product group, five of the eight products rated above 5.0. CommVault's Galaxy led all products with a very high 5.77, the highest category score among the enterprise products (see the "Product features" category in the "Enterprise backup software" chart, right). Veritas' NetBackup received its highest category rating for features (5.28). Six of the eight products had generally favorable ratings above 4.5 (only Syncsort Inc.'s Backup Express and CA's BrightStor Enterprise Backup rated below a 4.5). This suggests that the majority of enterprise products are suitable for most applications and environments. As opposed to features, product differentiators center on support, price, quality and reliability.
Lewis appreciates NetBackup's operational prowess after running into some problems with HP's Data Protector. "A lot of the features that you admittedly pay for in NetBackup just aren't there in [Data Protector]," he comments. "NetBackup is definitely much more robust," he says.
