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Top 10 Backup Vendors and Companies in 2023

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Updated 9th February 2023, Rob Morrison

Backup and recovery system vendors review.

Today, there are quite a lot of different backup and recovery vendors, each with their own list of features and shortcomings. Sometimes choosing a correct vendor for your company might be difficult, even without the fact that each of the existing vendors is constantly changing, adding and removing features from their products. While this helps them to stay relevant and up-to-date, it makes choosing the right vendor even more difficult for businesses.

Backup and recovery vendors can offer an overwhelming amount of different features, including encryption, one-click failovers, mobile data security, remote control capabilities and more. Even so, each of the backup vendors has their own strengths and weaknesses, and most of the time businesses have to do a lot of research to make a competent choice based on their own wants and needs. One  way to go about it is to look for the features your business needs the most at the lowest possible cost.

Even though the overall backup and recovery vendor market is extremely large, we’ve prepared an overview of several top-tier backup and recovery system vendors that have already proved themselves for exactly this kind of application:

Now, let’s talk about each of them in more detail.

Rubrik

Rubrik is a backup and recovery vendor that specializes in working with data management and protection within hybrid IT environments. One of the most notable features of Rubrik is RCDM (Rubrik Cloud Data Management) – their own high-class data protection solution that specializes in cloud integration. There’s also Polaris – Rubrik’s data management platform that works under the SaaS model (Software as a Service) and consists of mainly two parts – Polaris GPS and Polaris Radar. Polaris GPS’s main purpose is reporting and policy management, while Polaris Radar is famous for its ransomware detection and rehabilitation functions. It’s also worth noting that Rubrik can be deployed via both physical hardware and with the usage of virtual appliances.

However, nothing is perfect, and the same goes for Rubrik – there are some shortcomings of the service that were reported by current users, like somewhat cost-heavy VM and app protection for smaller companies or not enough granular control when it comes to working with Active Directory.

Rubrik front page

Veeam Backup & Replication

Virtual environments of any size can be easily protected by Veeam Backup & Replication. It’s a fast, flexible and reliable way of recovering your data and apps. There’s a single solution that includes both backup and recovery, and also protects the data of your VMware VSphere and Hyper-V virtual environments. The solution itself is able to scale well and support everything up to entire virtual infrastructures with features like instant file-level recovery, built-in deduplication capabilities and such.

Veeam Backup & Replication as a software has several different editions – from the free community version to more complex enterprise and enterprise-plus editions. Of course, they are priced differently, and offer a different number of features. Veeam is  one of the top backup and recovery system vendors on the market.

Veeam front page

Cohesity

One specific feature that separates Cohesity from its competitors is its clusterlike design with nodes when it comes to managing enterprise data. The solution’s scaling is managed through adding more nodes to the cluster (the base number is 3 nodes). Cohesity keeps backups in app-native formats and also uses NAS (Network-attached storage) protocols to export all kinds of data. Its primary use case is the backup of both VM and standard enterprise-grade apps’ infrastructures. 

One of the key features of the solution is the speed of data restoration – it is capable of restoring several VMs worth of data in a small amount of time, making for a very fast RTOs. At the same time, if you want granular recovery for MS Exchange or SharePoint – they’re both covered by specific add-ons and are charged over the base product cost.

Cohesity front page

IBM Spectrum Protect

IBM Spectrum Protect is designed to simplify data protection no matter the storage type – be it physical storage, virtual storage or cloud-based environments, and irrespective of system type, from virtual machines and file servers to databases, mainframes and desktops. It also provides multiple other capabilities – from backup and recovery to disaster recovery and bare metal recovery. Its base is an agentless, easy to use virtual environment with a low cost and automation capabilities, and it can be installed in both Hyper-V and VMware environments.

Licensing costs of this product are significantly lower than some other backup vendors since they charge per-backend-TB that is consumed no matter the data type or application type. The most popular Spectrum Protect use cases are VMware, Hyper-V, Oracle, SQL Server, Db2 and more.

IBM Spectrum Protect front page

Dell EMC Data Protection Suite

Dell EMC provides a full-fledged data protection solution to meet the needs of any organization. Data protection suite includes variable data protection levels depending on the current business needs. Comprehensive UI allows for easy visualisation of data protection even across multiple websites or systems, and in-built continuous data protection technology allows for fast recovery times in VM environments, even in the case of a disaster.You can choose the required data protection level yourself depending on current situation.

The software itself is packed with a variety of applications, allowing for a number of data storage types like NAS, tape, hardware snapshots and more. That also includes a separate backup into a cloud storage of your choosing as a means of preventing data loss in case of a disaster.  At the same time, Dell EMC offers a high level of resilience via automatization of data isolation, data analytics and data recovery.

Dell EMC front page

Vembu BDR Suite

Vembu BDR suite is a complex backup and recovery solution that specializes in data protection across both physical and virtual environments. Data protection concerns of company of any size can be handled by them – from small businesses to entire enterprises and data centers. It also provides a number of features like VMware backup, Hyper-V backup, Windows Image backup and basic file/application backup. There are also several data replication capabilities – you can store another copy of your data either within Vembu’s cloud (Cloud DR) or on Vembu’s offsite server (Offsite DR).

Vembu also takes pride in their easy configuration and overall responsiveness of the system as a whole. At the same time, some users have been reporting several hiccups or problems within the system, such as the ability to easily corrupt your own database unless you really know what you’re doing. Its reporting feature could also use some work.

Vembu front page

Veritas Backup Exec

One of the Veritas’s key points is their significant portfolio – it’s a relatively old company that has been around for several decades and works within a lot of fields, including backup and recovery services, information governance, multi cloud data management and so on. Veritas’s backup and recovery solution is able to work as a deployable software that is installed on customer’s hardware, as well as an integrated highly capable appliance that specializes in backup storage and backup process control.

Due to its long history, Veritas is favored by a lot of larger companies with some legacy and traditional traits in them. One of their key points is their ability to work on a significantly large scale, supporting over one thousand clients at once within a single environment. However, while Veritas scales well in regards to storage capacity – there’s little to no scaling efficiency in regards to the computing power capacity, which means that the clients would need additional computing appliances to work properly with larger data masses.

Veritas front page

NetApp SnapCenter

If you’re looking for a prominent data backup and recovery vendor with more than 150 offices around the world – NetApp SnapCenter is a solution for you. All of the typical backup and protection features are available for files, images, videos, etc. There’s also the ability to have constant access to your data either via laptop or using your own mobile phone. Specifically SnapCenter has a centralized interface to have all of your monitoring, backup scheduling, logging and other tasks performed and viewed in one convenient place. It applies to enterprise databases and applications, MS Exchange servers, virtual machines and more.

Users also praise support’s response time and overall system centralization. However, while the overall GUI centralization is highly regarded, it still needs some work when it comes to interface speed and overall customer satisfaction. Some users would also prefer for the documentation to be somewhat more descriptive to have the ability to work out some of the problems without the support’s help.

NetApp front page

Commvault

Commvault applies exclusive technologies in the field of data backup and recovery software to cover various data sources, multiple file types, backup types and storage types. For example, it allows you to backup your VM, database and endpoints with pinpoint accuracy with the best approach for the exact data type and recovery profile of your choosing. Commvault can recover VMs, backup both unstructured as well as structured data and transfer data from cloud to cloud. It offers an unprecedented level of VM management and protection using a variety of its tools.

Commvault supports over twenty different cloud storage providers, including the most popular ones – VMware, Azure, AWS and so on. There is some significant room for improvement though, including UI friendliness, according to clients reviews.

Commvault front page

Bacula Enterprise

Bacula Enterprise is a highly scalable, flexible backup and recovery software that allows for easy data backup, protection and recovery. It is a high grade enterprise solution for medium to large enterprises. As a backup solution, Bacula offers a vast number of different specialist features, such as an especially wide range of different backup storage types (including a high number of tape types and many Cloud storages), easy setup, low deployment costs and native SQL database support (MySQL, PostgreSQL and more). It also supports practically all of the popular Linux distributions, like Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, RHEL and more, and backs up and recovery data from many other operating systems – such as Microsoft, MacOS X, Android and Solaris. It also natively integrates with an unusually wide range of Hypervisors – such as VMware, Red Hat Virtualization, Xen, Proxmox, Hyper-V and KVM. The software’s overall performance and advanced deduplication and  protection levels are also something to consider.

Security features are a special strength of Bacula: enterprise levels of security are available on every level and stage of operating with the data.  Overall there is a very high availability. One of the prime points of Bacula’s service is the ability to escape price traps per data volume. This is because Bacula does not charge by data volume, and it therefore frees up organizations – not only to grow with much less restriction, but to also plan ahead with far more clarity.

How to choose across various backup vendors?

Clearly, there is no perfect solution for every possible backup need. Each company needs something specific from their backup vendors. The key to choosing the right vendor for you is to look not only for what you need the most at the current time, but to also look for the features you will need in your future backup and recovery vendor. For example, one of the ways Bacula plans ahead for a company’s future is by being the first to market with backup and recovery for Docker persistent volumes, and Kubernetes clusters. Some of the vendors of backup and recovery systems even provide free trial periods or product’s community versions to further help you in making the right choice.

About the author
Rob Morrison
Rob Morrison is the marketing director at Bacula Systems. He started his IT marketing career with Silicon Graphics in Switzerland, performing strongly in various marketing management roles for almost 10 years. In the next 10 years Rob also held various marketing management positions in JBoss, Red Hat and Pentaho ensuring market share growth for these well-known companies. He is a graduate of Plymouth University and holds an Honours Digital Media and Communications degree, and completed an Overseas Studies Program.