The Results Are In: This Was Exactly What BSM Readers Wanted
By The Business Solutions Network
Last week, we featured the results of our RMM (remote monitoring and management) product reviews in our Networking Newsletter and Storage and Managed Services Newsletter. Both newsletters performed better than all of our 2012 Networking and Managed Services newsletters. This has been an exciting confirmation from you, our readers, who first told us in last year's survey that the one change you wanted us to make was adding product reviews to our editorial. As always, we're glad we listened.
Our retail readers will be happy to hear that we're less than three weeks away from publishing the results of an all-in-one point of sale hardware test. Additionally, I'm currently working with our product tester, managed services provider Remote Technology Management, to prepare for our next networking and managed services test, which will be on the topic of BDR (backup and disaster recovery) and will appear in our March issue.
We have six vendors already confirmed to participate in our next review: Asigra, Axcient, CharTec, Datto, StorageCraft, and Unitrends. In case you're wondering how we chose the participants, our Best Channel Vendors special report will shed some light. This, also, can be found in our January issue.
Here are the criteria our tester will be using to compare each BDR product:
Criteria 1: Does the vendor have its own cloud data center? (Describe how this impacts the performance/experience of using this product).
Criteria 2: What kind of restore functionality does the vendor offer from its off-site storage? (e.g. can end users run their applications from the cloud without having to do a restore first? What other features/functions are available from the off-site data center/platform?)
Criteria 3: What type of backup does this vendor perform -- image based or file based? What are the strengths/weaknesses associated with each type?
Criteria 4: What is the minimum backup interval the storage system supports? Is there any meaningful difference among the vendors' backup intervals worth reporting on?
Criteria 5: What type of local virtualization restore does the product support (e.g. VMware VirtualBox, Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V). What are the strengths/weaknesses of each? Also, are any conversions required prior to virtualizing? If so, how does this affect the RTO?
Criteria 6: Does the vendor offer an all-in-one or software-only product? What are the pros and cons of this setup?
Criteria 7: How does the vendor perform during a bare metal restore? (include details about the time, complexity, and overall performance of the restore process)
Criteria 8: How does the pricing structure of one product compare with the others? Describe the key differentiators.
Criteria 9: Describe any key differences regarding the on-boarding process as well as making a customer service call.
Stay tuned for addition details as testing begins this week.