Vendor Landscape: Cloud Backup
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Vendor Landscape: Cloud Backup Match cloud economics with on-premise reliability. Info-Tech Research Group 1 Introduction The Cloud Backup Vendor Landscape is full of startups that are innovating and iterating. However, best-in-class solutions do exist. This Research Is Designed For: This Research Will Help You: IT leaders and storage managers tasked with Define what distinguishes enterprise-class selecting an offsite, or cloud-based, backup cloud backup from consumer-grade solutions. solution. Make sense of how cloud backup vendors Any organization looking to reduce capital differentiate themselves from competitors. expenditure and administrative burden on Shortlist cloud backup vendors based on backup storage, enhance disaster recovery which best align with your business capabilities, or simply looking to learn more requirements. about cloud backup vendors. Info-Tech Research Group 2 Executive Summary • The enterprise cloud backup market is still very nascent, with the oldest participating player being founded in 2005, and most being founded after 2008. There are several basic features that define an enterprise-class cloud backup solution though, and the future for the cloud backup space looks bright. • Among the products evaluated, CTERA, TwinStrata, and Nasuni took top honors and were named Champions. The solutions evaluated provide terrific value for what‟s offered, with appropriate solutions available for small, medium, and large businesses alike between the three vendors. • However, there are scenarios where solutions from other vendors are more appropriate, so defining business requirements, and aligning that with the use cases presented is still an important step in the nascent, but burgeoning, market. Info-Tech Research Group 3 Defining enterprise cloud backup: less reliance on the Internet, which improves the end user experience Though cloud backup vendors Info-Tech spoke to mentioned competing against Mozy Pro and iDrive, these are not business-ready options. • In a recent survey, conducted by Info-Tech Research Group, respondents indicated they had almost two times more “Complete confidence” in backup solutions that replicated to the cloud vs. those that backup directly to the cloud. The same respondents expressed more overall confidence in cloud replication solutions than disk-to-disk arrays. 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% Cloud Direct Tape Library D2D VTL Cloud D2D Array Replication Complete High Moderate • An enterprise-class cloud backup solution must include an on-premise cache of recently and frequently accessed files to mitigate any issues due to inconsistent Internet connectivity. Info-Tech Research Group 4 Market Overview How it got here Where it’s going • Evolved from traditional online backup - where • Commoditization of core cloud backup features is you paid for an allotment of storage capacity and causing new service providers to differentiate backed up servers directly to the Web to on-site themselves by specializing in niche markets. appliances that compress, deduplicate, and cache data before replicating to the cloud. • You‟ll be able to access files from anywhere, on any device, making enterprise-class cloud backup as easy • Enterprise cloud backup solutions are defined by to use as consumer-grade services. the ability to keep an on-site cache of frequently and recently accessed data, while completing • A simplification of backup architectures as cloud incremental backups or snapshots to the cloud. storage, both internal and external, matures. The use of tape for archiving will continue to decline as • Currently a wide open space where few vendors enterprises re-assess and refresh their backup have more than a few dozen clients, but those strategies. clients generate sizeable revenue. • Cross-cloud mirroring will become an industry standard feature within the next two years, lending additional reliability and redundancy. Overall, disk-to-disk backup is the most popular backup target, with 62% of survey respondents saying they had recently implemented new backup capacity. However, the number of businesses deploying cloud backup was 15%; equal to the number of companies deploying tape. Info-Tech Research Group 5 Cloud Backup Criteria & Weighting Factors Product Evaluation The solution provides basic Features and advanced feature/functionality. The five year TCO of the solution is Affordability economical. The solution‟s dashboard and reporting tools Usability are intuitive and easy to use. The delivery method of the solution aligns with Architecture what is expected within the space. Vendor Evaluation Vendor is profitable, knowledgeable, and will Viability be around for the long-term. Vendor is committed to the space and has a Strategy future product and portfolio roadmap. Vendor offers global coverage and is able to Reach sell and provide post-sales support. Vendor channel strategy is appropriate and the Channel channels themselves are strong. Info-Tech Research Group 6 The Info-Tech Cloud Backup Vendor Landscape™ Champions receive high scores for most evaluation criteria and offer excellent value. They have a strong market presence and are usually the trend setters for the industry. CTERA Emerging Players are newer vendors who are starting to gain a foothold in the TwinStrata marketplace. They balance product and StorSimple vendor attributes, though score lower relative to market Champions. Nasuni Innovators have demonstrated innovative product strengths that act as their competitive advantage in appealing to niche segments of the market. Market Pillars are established players with Zmanda very strong vendor credentials, but with more average product scores. Panzura For a complete description of Info-Tech’s Vendor Landscape™ methodology, see the Appendix. CoreVault Info-Tech Research Group 7 Every vendor has its strengths & weaknesses; pick the cloud backup vendor that best suits your needs Product Vendor Overall Features Usability Price Platform Overall Viability Strategy Reach Channel CoreVault CTERA Nasuni Panzura StorSimple TwinStrata Zmanda For an explanation of how Info-Tech Harvey Balls are calculated, please see the appendix. Info-Tech Research Group 8 CTERA, Nasuni, and TwinStrata offer the best value What is a Value Score? On a relative basis, CTERA maintained the highest Info-Tech Value Score of the vendor group. Vendors were indexed against CTERA‟s The Value Score indexes each vendor‟s product Champion performance to provide a complete, relative offering and business strength relative to their view of their product offerings. price point. It does not indicate vendor ranking. Vendors that score high offer more bang for the buck (e.g. features, usability, stability, etc.) than the average vendor, while the inverse is true for Average Score: 71.6 those that score lower. Price-conscious enterprises may wish to give the Value Score more consideration than those who 100 are more focused on specific vendor/product 95 93 attributes. 83 70 The cost estimates were generated using a real-life scenario provided to Info-Tech Research Group by 45 a client. For more information, see slide 30. 16 CTERA TwinStrata Nasuni Zmanda StorSimple Panzura CoreVault Sources: 1. To calculate the Value Score for each vendor, the affordability raw score was backed out, the product scoring reweighted, and the affordability score multiplied by the product of the Vendor and Product scores. Info-Tech Research Group 9 Every vendor in Cloud Backup meets the Basic Features, but who goes above and beyond in the areas that matter to you? The Basic Features What Does This Mean? The products assessed in this Vendor Data is encrypted while being transmitted to, 256-Bit Encryption LandscapeTM meet, at the very least, the and at rest in, the data center. requirements outlined as Basic Features. Incremental Only changed files or blocks are transmitted Backups after the first backup. All of the vendors go above and beyond the outlined Basic Features, most even do so in Standard Access Non-proprietary access methods like REST multiple categories. This section aims to highlight Methods APIs, WebDAV, and FTP must be available. the products‟ capabilities in excess of the criteria The service stores (and can automatically listed here. File Versioning delete) previous versions of files. SAS 70 Type II The data center storing your data has Certification successfully passed a SAS 70 Type II audit. Scheduled Backup frequency can be scheduled along Synchronization with a set start and end time. Storing frequently and recently accessed files Local Cache on-premise to reduce bandwidth usage. If Basic Features are all you need from your Cloud Backup solution, the only true differentiator for the organization is price. Otherwise, dig deeper to find the best price to value for your needs like cloud server mountable volumes, Web-based file sharing, Info-Tech Research Group 10 Basic Features aside, vendors were evaluated on their individual advanced feature offering Features What We Looked For Mirroring across geographically disparate data Cross-Cloud Mirroring centers or multiple cloud storage providers. Restoring servers without an underlying OS Bare Metal Restore and applications installed. Advanced features scoring methodology: File Sharing Web-based file sharing via a hyperlink. Recognizing duplicated files and storing just Deduplication one copy. Info-Tech scored each vendor‟s features Compressing the data before backup to Data Compression offering a summation of their individual scores reduce bandwidth utilization. across the listed advanced