Gartner’s Top 13 Backup And Recovery Software Leaders

From Veeam, Rubrik and Commvault to Dell Technologies and IBM, here’s where the top 13 backup and recovery software leaders rank in Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant.

The 13 World-Leading Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software Companies

With the move towards public cloud and ransomware attacks grabbing global headlines in 2021, concerns with backup and data management complexities are leading many businesses to rearchitect their backup infrastructure inside data centers and public clouds.

There are 13 vendors leading the backup and recovery software market on a global basis that are helping enterprises transform and improve their IT environment in data centers, according to Gartner’s new 2021 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions. The IT research firm says the enterprise backup and recovery software market underwent “significant transformation” over the past two years as ransomware solutions, support for public cloud backup and SaaS-based applications recovery take center stage in the new hybrid cloud world.

The world’s leading vendors are providing the backup and recovery software to capture a point-in-time copy of an enterprise workload and write the data out to a secondary storage device for the purpose of recovering the data in case of loss.

CRN breaks down the 13 vendors that made Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions leading the market on a worldwide basis.

Gartner Methodology

To make Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions, vendors need to generate – excluding implementation or managed services -- greater than $50 million from backup and recovery sales or more than $25 million in subscription or license revenue over the past four quarters. Additionally, the vendor must have at least 100 full-time employees and serve an installed base of at least 1,000 customers.

The vendor’s qualifying backup and recovery solution must focus on protecting enterprise environments running in the data center, which can be either a traditional center or a colocation facility. Protection of cloud-based IaaS, PaaS and SaaS workloads and remote sites is seen as an extension to these core capabilities.

Vendors added to this year’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions are Druva, Micro Focus and Zerto. Actifio is the only vendor that made Gartner’s 2020 backup and recovery quadrant that failed to make Gartner’s 2021 quadrant.

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).

Leader: Veeam

The gold medal for execution on Gartner’s backup and recovery software Magic Quadrant went to Veeam. The company, which is co-headquartered in Ohio and Switzerland, also ranks fourth in terms of vision on the quadrant. Veeam’s Availability Suite (VAS) is composed of Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE for backup monitoring and analytics. Backup for public cloud environments and disaster recovery (DR) orchestration is enabled through add-on products. Over the past 12 months, Veeam launched new tools for Azure and Google Cloud Platform backup and acquired Kasten to expand its portfolio to include container backup support.

Strength: Veeam offers instant recovery of Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware VMs, network attach storage (NAS) environments, and automated instant recovery of Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Databases. The company also provides transparent public cloud backup costs with customers reporting a high level of satisfaction with Veeam’s technical support, according to Gartner.

Weakness: Some customers report large-scale Veeam deployments are complex to manage because deployments typically include several components such as multiple backup servers, proxy servers, mount servers, agents and backup repositories. Gartner said Veeam also lacks global deduplication.

Leader: Rubrik

Rubrik won the gold medal for vision on Gartner’s backup and recovery software Magic Quadrant, while also ranking fourth in execution. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s portfolio consists of its core backup software platform Rubrik Cloud Data Management (RCDM); Polaris, a SaaS-based platform for centralized visibility and management that leverages metadata to provide ransomware assessment, recovery and data classification; and Mosaic for NoSQL workload protection. Over the past year, RCDM added backup support for AWS RDS, Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive, SAP HANA on Google Cloud Platform and VMware Cloud on AWS. Rubrik also acquired Igneous, which provides scale-out NAS data management for cloud-based archival and recovery.

Strength: Gartner customer reviews show Rubrik offers an intuitive UI that is easy to operate and scale. Additionally, RCDM provides comprehensive support for all major relational databases and NoSQL databases.

Weakness: Rubrik doesn’t support backup of Salesforce and Google Workspace environments. RCDM requires a four-node VM cluster to be deployed in the public cloud to support protection and recovery of applications and databases hosted in public cloud IaaS, which increases computing costs.

Leader: Commvault

Commvault won the silver medal for both execution and vision on Gartner’s backup and recovery software Magic Quadrant. The Tinton Falls, N.J.-based company’s backup and recovery portfolio consists of Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault HyperScale X and Commvault Metallic. Commvault continues to boost its cloud-native data protection capabilities around AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The company has also recently launched new features to its Metallic SaaS platform including backup for SAP HANA, Oracle, Salesforce, files and Kubernetes. Last month, Commvault reported first fiscal quarter 2022 sales of $183 million, up 13 percent year over year.

Strength: Gartner touts Commvault’s deployment flexibility in which customers can select one or a combination of software-only, appliance or SaaS solutions with unified management. The company is well positioned with its data protection as-a-service offering in the new hybrid cloud world.

Weakness: Large enterprises report Commvault Backup & Recovery is offered at higher price points compared to the competition, Gartner said. Commvault’s customers are also concerned regarding high maintenance costs.

Leader: Veritas Technologies

Veritas Technologies won the bronze medal for execution on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and ranks fifth for vision. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s backup portfolio includes NetBackup, NetBackup Appliances and Backup Exec. Recent enhancements to NetBackup include support for Azure Archive tiering, Azure Stack, AWS Outposts, VMware on AWS, VMware on Azure, and improvements for backup of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and NAS. This year, Veritas acquired SaaS application protection specialist HubStor that offers backup-as-a-service expertise.

Strength: NetBackup supports a broad range of operating systems, hypervisors and public clouds, and integrates with all major primary storage array players. The new NetBackup 9.0 provides over 500 APIs that help automate deployment and policy management.

Weakness: Some customers indicate that technical support quality and response time are “substandard,” Gartner said. Veritas’ malware and security scanning in an isolated recovery environment, using third-party security engines, requires API integration or scripting.

Leader: Dell Technologies

The $94 billion Round Rock, Texas-based PC and infrastructure giant ranks fifth for execution and sixth for vision on Gartner’s backup and recovery software Magic Quadrant. Dell Technologies’ software includes Dell EMC Data Protection Suite, composed of Avamar, NetWorker and PowerProtect Data Manager. Dell’s appliance portfolio includes its PowerProtect DP series and PowerProtect DD Series. Over the past 12 months, Dell has made several major software updates to PowerProtect Data Manager including support for application-consistent backups in Kubernetes such as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes and SAP HANA backup. Additionally, Dell provided new guest workload support for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Strength: Dell’s PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution offers comprehensive ransomware detection and recovery capabilities both on-premises and in public clouds. Its Data Protection Suite provides deep integration with VMware, while enterprises usually purchase the suite alongside a larger Dell solution.

Weakness: Dell depends on third-party vendors for protecting Nutanix AHV VMs and OpenStack environments, as well as for granular search and restore for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server.

Leader: Cohesity

Cohesity won the bronze medal for vision on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant while also ranking sixth for execution. The San Jose, Calif.-based company’s backup solutions consist of DataProtect, which is a service that runs its SaaS-based data management platform Cohesity Helios. Cohesity recently launched its BaaS offering that uses the Cohesity Helios platform, DataProtect service and AWS infrastructure to protect and manage hybrid environments. New software features also include support for instant restore of Oracle Databases and disaster recovery for VMware. Last year, Cohesity generated $250 million in new funding.

Strength: Gartner said customers tout that DataProtect service is simple to use and easy to manage at scale. The Cohesity marketplace enables ISVs to integrate with the Cohesity platform and offers a broad range of additional data reuse capabilities.

Weakness: DataProtect was released with a high number of known issues and issues reported by customers, which Gartner says indicates a need for better quality assurance testing. Cohesity has a small number of channel partners in emerging markets.

Challenger: IBM

IBM ranks in the top of the pack for execution and among the bottom for vision on Gartner’s backup and recovery software Magic Quadrant. The Armonk, N.Y.-based company’s Spectrum Protect portfolio addresses data protection and reuse requirements for a broad range of applications. IBM’s Spectrum Protect Plus is a comprehensive solution for container backup that recently became available in the AWS marketplace. IBM also recently made enhancements around Kubernetes backup and support for Google Cloud object storage. Last month, IBM hired David Wyshner as its new CFO.

Strength: Spectrum Protect Plus components are all packaged into a single OVA file that can be used to deploy the backup software as a virtual appliance in VMware and Hyper-V environments, while IBM Blueprints simplifies deployments with pre-validated reference architectures and sizing guidelines.

Weakness: Gartner said IBM depends on third-party vendors to address backup requirements for Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Exchange Online, some NoSQL databases, Nutanix AHV VMs, OpenStack environments, hardware snapshot management and bare-metal recovery of operating systems.

Challenger: Arcserve

Arcserve ranks among the middle of the pack for execution and near the bottom of the pack for vision on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. It is key to note that Minneapolis, Minn.-based Arcserve merged with StorageCraft this year which expanded its portfolio to include scale-out storage and data protection capabilities such as SaaS backup. Arcserve offers its Unified Data Protection (UDP), Backup, Appliances, UDP Cloud Direct, Arcserve UDP Cloud Hybrid Secured by Sophos, and Arcserve Cloud Backup for Office 365. Arcserve recently unveiled its X series Appliances, an integrated backup, disaster recovery and security solution.

Strength: Gartner said Arcserve has one the lowest socket-based license prices among all vendors in the market. Additionally, Arcserve partners with Sophos to offer appliances with built-in malware detection capabilities.

Weakness: Arcserve UDP doesn’t integrate with public cloud snapshot APIs from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Azure VMs, or Google Compute Engine. It also doesn’t support backup of PaaS environments such as AWS, Amazon Relational Database Service, or Azure SQL.

Visionary: Druva

New to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant this year is Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Druva, which ranks among the middle of the pack for vision and in the bottom pack for execution. This year, Druva reached a $2 billion valuation along with a new $147 million funding round. The Druva Cloud Platform is a BaaS-based offering leveraging AWS infrastructure for storing and managing backup data. Its three products are Phoenix for server backup, inSync for SaaS applications and endpoint backup, and CloudRanger for cloud-native backup and DR. New capabilities over the past 12 months include a ransomware recovery service, Azure Active Directory integration, as well as the acquisition of sfApex to boost its Salesforce data protection capabilities.

Strength: Druva’s metadata pipeline and repository offers differentiated search and analytics capabilities that enable use cases such as e-discovery, ransomware detection and recovery, and storage optimization.

Weakness: The company has a limited enterprise data center presence. Druva’s support for non-AWS public cloud IaaS environments such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform is a work in progress, Gartner said.

Visionary: Acronis

Acronis ranks among the middle of the pack for vision and in the bottom pack for execution on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. The Switzerland-based company’s Cyber Protect Cloud backup as-a-service platform offers cloud-based backup and security services primarily delivered by service providers through 30 data centers. Acronis’ Cyber Protect software can be deployed on-premises to provide an integrated backup and security solution for physical servers, on-premises VMs, cloud instances and endpoints. New Acronis security features launched for both on-premises and BaaS platforms improve malware detection and provided safe recovery of backup copies. In May, Acronis raised $250 million to increase recruitment and support around the vendor’s service provider channel.

Strength: Acronis has differentiated edge computing and ransomware security capabilities including the ability to actively scan for security threats and verify the authenticity and recoverability of backup copies.

Weakness: Acronis’ enterprise clients mostly use the solution to protect edge environments and endpoints. Gardner said Acronis’ product and sales strategy has limited focus on enterprise data center backup.

Niche Player: Zerto

Brand new to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions this year is Boston-based Zerto. The Zerto platform is a converged backup and DR solution aimed at protecting workloads both on-premises and in the cloud. New features recently released include support for AWS and Microsoft Azure as long-term retention targets, instant file recovery, and improvements in backup performance and capacity monitoring. Zerto ranks among the bottom of the pack for both vision and execution on Gartner’s backup and recovery software Magic Quadrant. In July, Hewlett Packard Enterprise unveiled its plan to acquire Zerto for $374 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of HPE’s fiscal year 2021.

Strength: Zerto provides a single platform that combines backup and DR functionality to simplify data protection architectures. Gartner said customers indicate that the company offers an intuitive UI that facilitates ease of use.

Weakness: Zerto doesn’t support malware detection and relies on third-party storage repositories for providing backup immutability. Gartner says due to architectural limitations, Zerto does not support air-gapping capabilities.

Niche Player: Unitrends

The Burlington, Mass.-based company offers the Unitrends Backup Software, Recovery Series Backup Appliance and Spanning Backup for SaaS application backup. Over the past year, Unitrends launched UniView, a platform that offers central management of multiple Recovery Series appliances and SaaS applications, and has continued to improve security and analytics capabilities on its software platform. Unitrends ranks near the bottom for both execution and vision on Gartner’s backup and recovery software Magic Quadrant.

Strength: Unitrends offers unlimited retention of backup data with no egress charges, and optional disaster recovery through its Unitrends Cloud data centers, at significantly lower costs when compared to public cloud providers, according to Gartner.

Weakness: The company doesn’t support backup of Oracle RAC Database instances, and offers limited capabilities for backing up SAP HANA and NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Cassandra. Additionally, Unitrends does not integrate with snapshot APIs provided by AWS EC2, Azure VMs or Google Cloud.

Niche Player: Micro Focus

Micro Focus is a new player on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions. The U.K.-based company’s Data Protector platform primarily protects workloads in physical and virtual environments. New capabilities recently announced include support for Microsoft 365 Exchange Online, improved Hyper-V backup, and integration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Primera storage array snapshots. Micro Focus ranks in last place on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for both vision and execution.

Strength: Data Protector Express edition for virtual environments offers one of the lowest price-per-socket licensing among all the vendors in the market, Gartner said. Data Protector supports a broad range of purpose-built deduplication appliance vendors.

Weakness: Gartner said Micro Focus trails the competition in its ability to provide data protection capabilities for public cloud IaaS, SaaS and hyperconverged infrastructure. It also lacks critical anti-ransomware functionality such as detection of anomalous conditions, isolated recovery orchestration and integration with third-party malware scanners.