Gartner’s Data Center Backup And Recovery Magic Quadrant Leaders

CRN breaks down the 11 market leaders, including Commvault, Dell Technologies, Rubrik and Veeam, who made Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions.

Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant For Data Center Backup And Recovery

Businesses are rearchitecting their backup infrastructure and data management solutions when moving toward public cloud as new ransomware concerns are also driving the market to change, according to Gartner’s new 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup And Recovery Solutions.

The backup and recovery market has transformed over the past two years through innovation via centralized management in a hybrid world, ransomware detection and remediation as the number of attacks increase, better recovery capabilities in the public cloud, and new support for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. Additional trends in the backup and recovery market include more companies leveraging NoSQL database backup software as well as instant recovery of databases and virtual machines.

Here are the 11 market-leading companies that made Gartner‘s 2020 Magic Quadrant For Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions, along with assessments of each company’s strengths and weaknesses in the space.

Gartner’s Data Center Backup And Recovery Methodology

In order to make Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, vendors needed to meet certain revenue and customer benchmarks as well as products geared toward the enterprise.

For example, a vendor needs to generate at least $25 million from the sale of product licenses and maintenance over the past four quarters combined with a growth rate of more than 20 percent year over year. Vendors must provide backup and recovery solutions with a focus on protecting enterprise environments running in the data center, along with an install base of at least 350 customers. The vendor’s solution needs to support backup and granular restores of data in both physical and virtualized deployments.

Gartner‘s Magic Quadrant ranks vendors on their ability to execute and completeness of vision and places them in four categories: Niche Players (low on vision and execution), Visionaries (good vision but low execution), Challengers (good execution but low vision) and Leaders (excelling in both vision and execution). For this particular Magic Quadrant, no companies were included in the ‘Challengers’ category.

Leader: Veeam

Veeam won the gold medal for execution on Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions thanks to the Veeam Availability Suite, which includes Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE for backup monitoring and analytics. The company, who ranks fifth for vision on the Magic Quadrant, provides additional add-on products to the suite including Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, Veeam Backup for AWS and Veeam Availability Orchestrator. Veeam was acquired by private equity firm Insight Partners in March for $5 billion. At its VeeamON 2020 conference in June, the company also launched a slew of new AWS, Microsoft Teams and NetApp products.

Strength: Veeam Universal License allows customers to repurpose the same licenses when they switch hypervisors, migrate from physical to virtual or cloud environment, or from on-premise to cloud.

Weakness: Gartner said some customers report large-scale Veeam deployments are complex to manage due to the deployment typically comprising of multiple backup servers, proxy servers, mount servers, agents and backup repositories.

Leader: Commvault

Commvault ranks second for execution in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant as well as third place for vision. Gartner said the company supports the broadest range of applications, databases, public cloud environments, hypervisors, NAS systems and primary storage arrays of all the vendors on the Magic Quadrant. The Tinton Falls, N.J.-based company provides its Complete Backup & Recovery offering as well as Commvault HyperScale which is also sold in an appliance form factor. Last year, Commvault acquired software-defined storage vendor Hedvig to add multiple primary and secondary storage capabilities. Commvault recently simplified its channel partner program.

Strength: Commvault protects the largest number of public cloud virtual machine instances in the market, Gartner said, as customer rely on Commvault to protect cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS workloads when migrating to the public cloud.

Weakness: Commvault HyperScale is built on Red Hat and not its own file system, which may increase the overall time to deliver critical OS updates.

Leader: Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies’ ranks third for execution on the Magic Quadrant and among the middle of the pack for vision. The Round Rock, Texas-based company’s backup and recovery software mainly consists of its Data Protection Suite that includes Avamar, NetWorker and PowerProtect Data Manager. Dell’s appliances portfolio comprises Integrated Data Protection Appliances, PowerProtect DD Series Appliances and PowerProtect X Series Appliances. VMware, which is majority owned by Dell, acquired Datrium to boost its disaster recovery capabilities. The company has a strong channel partner and direct sales and support presence across the globe.

Strength: Dell Technologies’ PowerProtect DD and Data Protection Suite offers data reduction ratios that are higher than most competitors with the ability to reduce overall storage consumption and costs.

Weakness: Gartner said some of Dell’s Data Protection Suite clients have consistently expressed concerns about high annual maintenance fees.

Leader: Rubrik

Rubrik won the gold medal for vision on the Magic Quadrant and placed among the middle of the pack for execution. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s portfolio is the Rubik Cloud Data Management (RCDM) for core backup; SaaS-based Polaris platform for centralized management and ransomware remediation and data classification; and Mosaic for NoSQL workload protection. In March, Rubik tapped former ServiceNow chief marketing officer Dan Rogers as its first-ever president to lead its go-to-market operations. New RCDM innovation includes native continuous data protection capabilities for VMware and improved data tiering to Microsoft Azure.

Strength: Polaris Radar monitors the backup environment for anomalies by applying machine learning models that are continuously refined, while backup data is stored in an immutable format to increase resilience against ransomware.

Weakness: RCDM requires a four-node VM cluster to be deployed in the public cloud to support granular protection and recovery of applications and databases hosted in public cloud infrastructure, which increases the total cost of ownership of running backup in the public cloud.

Leader: Veritas Technologies

Veritas Technologies ranks fourth for both execution and vision on the Magic Quadrant. The Santa, Clara, Calif.-based company’s backup portfolio consists of its NetBackup software, NetBackup Appliances, NetBackup CloudPoint, Flex Appliance and Backup Exec. Veritas has several customers that have deployed NetBackup to protect multiple petabytes and more than 10,000 virtual machines in a single environment. Last week, the company expanded its enterprise-focused NetBackup with the inclusion of new cloud capabilities previously requiring separate licenses, and significantly boosted its ability to counter ransomware.

Strength: NetBackup CloudPoint protects virtual instances deployed in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform by integrating with the native snapshot capabilities of these public cloud offers.

Weakness: Veritas has external dependency for SaaS backup, with data protection requirements for Office 365, Salesforce and G Suite delivered via a third-party SaaS backup vendor.

Leader: Cohesity

Ranked as a ‘Visionary’ in last year’s Magic Quadrant, Gartner has elevated Cohesity to a ‘Leader’ in 2020, ranking second for vision and among the middle of the pack for execution. Cohesity’s DataProtect backup product is part of the Cohesity DataPlatform which is a scale-out software-defined platform that consolidates application and backup management. Last year, Cohesity acquired Imanis Data to expand its capabilities to include NoSQL data protection. The company’s recently launched a new consumption-based pricing model for MSPs to help clients cut up-front data infrastructure costs, while Cohesity also closed on a $250 million funding round.

Strength: A Cohesity cluster can comprise server nodes from different OEMs – such as Dell, Cisco and HPE -- as well as Cohesity nodes.

Weakness: Gardner said Cohesity’s frequent major update cadence to DataProtect has resulted in a high number of known issues and concerns reported by customers, indicating an inadequate prerelease quality assurance testing process.

Leader: IBM

IBM ranks fifth for execution on the Magic Quadrant and among the middle of the pack for vision. IBM’s portfolio consists of Spectrum Protect, Spectrum Protect Plus and Spectrum Copy Data Management that together address data protection and reuse requirements for a broad range of applications. The Armonk, N.Y.-based company launched new features in Spectrum Protect Plus including support for Microsoft Exchange Online and OneDrive, MongoDB, and VMware Cloud on AWS, and support for containers. Last month, IBM introduced new storage hardware and software aimed at placing its storage at the center of large-scale data requirements for artificial intelligence and analytics workloads.

Strength: IBM has both a strong direct and indirect presence through a large network of channel partners throughout mature and emerging markets.

Weakness: IBM depends on third-party vendors for backup requirements for SharePoint, some NoSQL databases, Nutanix AHV VMs and bare-metal recovery of operating systems, thus requiring customers to deploy additional products.

Visionary: Actifio

Actifio ranks among the middle of the pack for both vision and execution on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. The Waltham, Mass.-based flagship product, Actifio Sky, focuses on providing data protection and copy data management capabilities for virtual machines and large databases, both on-premises and in a variety of public clouds. The company recently unveiled Actifio 10c, a software update that introduced key features such as the “mount and migrate” feature for efficient database and VM recovery, automated disaster recovery orchestration and cloud VM snapshot management. In an interview with CRN this year, Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh said the future will include storage designed for applications, not infrastructure.

Strength: Actifio’s platform can be deployed as a virtual appliance with Actifio Sky or its bare-metal CDX appliance, as well as be deployed and consumed as a SaaS offering via Actifio GO in all leading public cloud providers.

Weakness: The company’s list price for software licenses and annual maintenance is higher than most vendors on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Visionary: Acronis

Gartner elevated Acronis from a ‘Niche Player’ in 2019 to a ‘Visionary’ in its 2020 Magic Quadrant. The Switzerland-based company ranks among the middle of the pack for vision on the Magic Quadrant and near the bottom for execution. Its Cyber Backup platform provides an integrated data protection and security solution that covers on-premises, cloud and edge environments. Acronis offers a disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering as a part of the Acronis Cyber Cloud for Enterprise. In July, Acronis acquired DeviceLock to enforce privacy at the device level and prevent threat actors from accessing data on an organizations system.

Strength: Acronis’ products and documentation are localized in 25 languages, the highest number among all vendors on the Magic Quadrant, according to Gartner.

Weakness: Acronis trails its competitors in providing comprehensive data protection capabilities for public cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure and network-attached storage (NAS) environments.

Niche Player: Arcserve

Arcserve ranks among the bottom of the pack for both execution and vision on the Magic Quadrant. Arcserve’s backup portfolio includes: Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP); Arcserve Backup for tape support; Arcserve Appliances Secured by Sophos; Arcserve Cloud Direct; and Arcserve UDP Cloud Hybrid Secured by Sophos for cloud-based backup, off-site retention and DR. It also includes Arcserve Cloud Backup for Office 365 Secured by Sophos for cloud-to-cloud protection of Microsoft Office 365 email, files and SharePoint sites. Arcserve recently launched Arcserve UDP 7.0 to provide support for Nutanix AHV and Microsoft OneDrive.

Strength: Gartner said arcserve offered the lowest socket-based license pricing among all vendors evaluated in the market in 2019.

Weakness: Arcserve UDP offers limited capabilities for detecting ransomware attacks on the backup copy and ransomware recovery and testing. Customers that require tape support must separately install Arcserve Backup alongside UDP.

Niche Player: Unitrends

Unitrends, a Kaseya company, ranks last for both execution and vision on the Magic Quadrant. Unitrends data center backup portfolio includes Unitrends Backup Software, Recovery Series Backup Appliance, and Spanning Backup for Office 365. The company’s Recovery Series MAX Appliance is offered in six configurations that address various requirements of SMB and midmarket customers. This year, Ireland-based Unitrends launched Helix, a SaaS-based management platform that centrally manages software updates for backup appliances and monitors backup failures in Windows environments.

Strength: Unitrends Forever Cloud program supports long-term retention of data beyond seven years in Unitrends’ managed cloud infrastructure with no egress charges and with options for performing regular recovery testing in the cloud.

Weakness: The company’s support for backup of Oracle Database and SAP HANA databases is not granular or comprehensive. Additionally, Unitrends backup instance doesn’t integrate with native snapshot capabilities from AWS and Azure.