Analyst rankings of virtual server backup software put CommVault Simpana 9 and CA ARCserve r15 in place as the best all-round products.

The DCIG 2011 Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer's Guide is a collaboration between two analyst firms: Jerome Wendt's DCIG and SMB Research. They admit to paid assignments from some of the vendors whose products were reviewed, but say they were not paid to produce their report and it is an independent evaluation.

The analysts sent questionnaires to some 30 firms and received 24 replies. They classified the questions into various aspects of virtual server backup and recovery, weighted the replies according to user-related conversations, and scored the vendors' replies. The mean and the statistical deviation were calculated and vendors' products ranked on both the individual aspects and overall, with five rankings from Basic, through Good to Excellent, and then Recommended.

The highest recommended product was separated out as Best-in-Class and this was CommVault's Simpana 9 product with a score of 94. It was just one point ahead of CA's ARCserve r215, which was recommended because it scored more than 1.25 standard deviations above the mean.

In the Excellent category were six vendors' products (with scores in brackets): Arkeia Network Backup v9 (89); IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6 (88); EMC Avamar (87); HP Data Protector 6.1 (86), Symantec Backup Exec 2010 (86); and Quest's vRanger PRO 4.5 (84). Scores ranged from 0.5 standard deviations above the mean to 1.24 above it.

The Good category, ranging from 0.25 standard deviations below the mean to 0.49 above, had nine products identified. The Basic category had seven products identified, with scores more than 0.25 standard deviations below the mean. This bunch included Microsoft's Data Protection Manager 2010 and Seagate's i365 EVault Data Protection Software.

The 81-page report is freely available from CommVault's website, at a cost of providing sales lead-type information. ®