Home > Glossary > Microfocus competitors in 2020. The former HP Data Protector alternatives.

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Updated 11th November 2020, Rob Morrison

Microfocus competitors in 2020. HP Data Protector alternatives.

Microfocus Data Protection (HP Data Protector) and its competitors in 2020.

The variety and volume of information in enterprises has increased dramatically over the last 10 years and the need to implement mechanisms for data protection has grown significantly. The number of backup solutions for enterprises has increased accordingly, even though competition between vendors is becoming evermore sophisticated. One of these solutions is Microfocus Data Protection – a set of modular tools that execute backup of the sensitive data of organizations and protect from situations that may affect data availability and integrity. This application is provided by Microfocus Enterprise, which offers solutions to businesses including analytical tools and applications. In 2017 it merged with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This M&A deal gave the opportunity to consolidate applications and software developed by both organizations and offer them as a unified portfolio of services.

Data protection allows users to configure and manage backup and recovery of their. organization’s activities using existing technology resources, and different and varied storage devices located in various locations and in corporate heterogeneous environments. This can be done from one or more centralized configuration and management consoles.

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Among the functions and features that are offered by Microfocus Data Protection are:

Extensive protection of the company’s operating environments: modern and legacy, using physical, virtual or cloud resources that simplify data protection and is scalable to billions of files, devices, and media systems.
Native recovery through integration with applications by the use of plugins, for example Oracle, Microsoft, SAP/HANA, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Sybase and DB2 that allows selection of granular, automated point-in-time objects, decreasing administration and execution times.
Implementation of predictive analytics, reporting and monitoring, which allows to register and manage SLAs and service levels for incidents and failures that occur in applications and organizational systems. These are subsequently used for management, control and resource estimation.

Automated disaster recovery in situations that involve lost partial or complete information with the use of centralized bare metal recovery from physical and virtual systems.
Enhanced and integrated security mechanisms, helping to improve security in data sets of backups through the implementation of sophisticated models.
Better integration with storage solutions, which allows users to speed up and simplify backup and recovery operations by enabling snapshots of hardware and deduplication of data.

The arrival of new technologies and emergence of new paradigms led to more backup and recovery applications emerging, not only to be able to integrate with existing technologies but also, exploiting these new resources in both an IT and a business context.

Some of these technologies and changes are:

Open source, including its scheme and policies for the use and reuse of technology.
Reduction of storage costs.
New protocols and concepts for the transfer and copy of data.
Algorithms for data compression and encryption.

Improvements to physical and logical level of communications and bandwidth, as well as network resources.
Algorithms for optimization and better use of storage space.
Methodologies and mechanisms of speedy recovery in case of disaster or lost information pools.

In addition to the use of these technologies and concepts, backup solutions including Microfocus have developed the following features and functionalities:

Simple and friendly management tools that allow to perform the operation and configuration activities seamlessly in a complete and consistent manner, with the appropriate levels of security and access control.
Centralized data backup that allows the execution of the operations in flexible environments adapting to existing storage resources, servers, networks, etc.
Adaptability to different environments of operation existing on enterprises, not only to physical and logical level, but also at the level of organizational processes.
Ability to grow along with the company as the backup and recovery requirements scale in time.
Possibility to perform different levels of backup (incremental, differential and full), adjusted to the requirements of operation..

Optimization of the configuration and execution of backup policies and scheduling.
Management of historical data in different repositories with easy access and adequate levels of security.
Use of the information generated from the backup activities for the preparation of the reports needed in the organizational processes such as: capacity planning, data management, indicators management, big data, etc.
Integration and interaction with mobile platforms, not only for the review of notifications and monitoring, but also for administration and management.
Ease of use and management of resources in the cloud, which facilitates the operation in hybrid technology environments.

As enterprise backup software, Microfocus has many features in common with competitors. However some of the newer players have taken more advantage of the new technologies, which in turn facilitates:

Use of open source as emerging technology development and implementation.
Decrease of the implementation and hardware technology costs.
Use of tools and diverse applications for the backup data repository: SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, etc.
Ability to more easily scale according to the requirements and needs of the company, for business processes or users who are involved in them.

The use of resources in the cloud which allows to access backups from different sites worldwide and accordingly offer opportunities to significantly reduce storage costs.
More simple licensing models, but with the greater levels of quality and support.

Considering the fact that this technology is in constant growth and evolution, and continuous improvements in terms of existing paradigms are still under development, it is very likely that Microfocus competitors will maintain this trend and take advantage of the following improvements:

Storage solutions in the cloud that allows operation in environments operation hybrids.
Implementation of the performance improvements allowing the optimization of the bandwidth use.
Improvement of algorithms and mechanisms for encryption of backup data and the transmission channel for the execution of backups to local or remote locations.

Implementation of new methodologies and types of backups for the execution of the jobs that optimize the use of resources, storage, CPU, etc., and decrease the time of execution of the backup and recovery.
Implementation in hybrid organizational environments, for the daily execution of operations and also implementation of projects, such as mass migration of data, environments for disaster recovery, alternate centers of data, etc.

Bacula Enterprise Edition and Microfocus Data Protection are competitors and share many characteristics as enterprise backup software, however Bacula Enterprise offers solutions with greater breadth of features, combined with a simpler, lower cost licensing model. This licensing model is based only on the number of backup agents with zero charges for CPUs, sockets or data volume. This licensing takes the form of an annual subscription, which includes its highly renowned support services as well as the software.

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About the author

Rob Morrison Rob on LinkedIn

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.

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