The Winners of the Backup and Disaster Recovery Hardware, Software and Services Category of the 2021 Competition Storage magazine and the SearchStorage Products of the Year competition reflect some of the top concerns of data protection professionals, as well as growing market trends.
Increased ransomware protection is common to all three winners. With widespread remote working continuing, critical data is more vulnerable to attack than ever. This has led to backup-specific developments in ransomware technology.
Cloud-native backup is a core component of the top two offerings — from Druva Inc. and Veeam Software — in this category. Cloud backup and recovery are abundant on the market today, but products that simplify the cloud and improve reliability stand out from the competition.
Immutability is a useful data saving feature, especially against ransomware. Immutable backups can prevent malicious or accidental deletion of data because they are not modifiable. Both Veeam and our bronze winner, Kasten by Veeam, offer unchanging products.
Additionally, Kubernetes integration, a feature of Veeam and Kasten, is an area of increased focus in the backup landscape.
The overall category included data protection hardware, backup software built into hardware appliances, tape libraries and drives, backup media, disk backup targets, and deduplication devices. It also covered backup and restore software; cloud backup and recovery services; and on-premise backup and disaster recovery (DR), snapshot, replication, and archiving products.
Gold Winner: Druva Cloud Platform
Updates to the Druva Cloud Platform, now called Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, impressed the judges this year, earning it first place in the Backup and DR Hardware, Software and Services category. The cloud-native data protection platform added anomaly detection, hybrid workload protection, and orchestrated cloud disaster recovery.
Those characteristics has made an already solid data protection platform even better suited to the growing threat of ransomware. “Zero-Trust security models are increasingly important, especially when it comes to providing backup and ransomware protection,” a judge said.
In addition to providing protection for SaaS applications, the product is reasonably priced for high performance without added complexity.
“It offers cloud-like simplicity from a cloud-delivered service,” said another judge, who also cited the platform’s pricing flexibility as a major benefit.
Easy installation, industry-leading application support, and scalable framework are other key features that helped Druva strike gold.
As one judge succinctly put it, “Druva just works.
Silver Winner: Veeam Backup & Replication v11
Veeam Backup & Replication is a major player in the market. Version 11 of the product not only continued to do what Veeam does best, but introduced over 200 improvements.
The continuous protection of virtual machine data was a highlight for the judges, along with the immutable backup features that make backup and replication well suited for ransomware protection. The product integrates native backup and recovery for major cloud services including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
The integration of Kubernetes and AI support made this offering stand out to a judge, who called it “super tech.”
other friendly updates to the platform enable customers to better meet SLAs with disaster preparedness and ransomware protection. These features help mitigate downtime and data loss, as well as help meet data retention compliance requirements.
Kubernetes support is an increasingly important feature for data backup and DR services, and many backup vendors have begun to extend or release Kubernetes features.
Bronze winner: Kasten K10 v4.5
Acquired by Veeam Software in September 2020, Kasten has seen a tear in the backup and disaster recovery services market with its Kubernetes-focused protection. K10 v4.5 added immutability for ransomware protection and accidental deletion insurance. It supports container services, such as HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, Microsoft Azure Stack, Nutanix Karbon, and Red Hat OpenShift.
“Kasten’s K10 is one of the most innovative solutions for cloud-native data protection,” a judge said. “It’s heavily integrated with Kubernetes, while offering a level of ransomware protection that goes beyond what many of its competitors can offer.”
“Kasten was and continues to be the premier container backup software,” said another judge.
Kasten K10 took first place in this category in 2020 with an earlier version, and the vendor has continued to innovate and improve the product. According to Kasten, this release incorporates the industry’s first native Kubernetes ransomware protection capabilities.
Get the full list of Storage magazine and the winners of SearchStorage’s 2021 Product of the Year category.
