Windows It Pro Readers' Choice - Disaster & Recovery

DISASTER PREVENTION & RECOVERY

Enterprise Backup/ Recovery/Archive Service 1st—Iron Mountain Electronic Vaulting http://www.ironmountain.com 2nd—LiveVault InControl http://www.livevault.com 3rd—LiveVault InSync http://www.livevault.com

Replication/Data Availability Solution 1st—Neverfail Group Neverfail for Windows Product Suite http://www.neverfailgroup.com 2nd—NSI Software Double-Take http://www.nsisoftware.com 3rd—VERITAS Software Replication Exec http://www.veritas.com

UPS 1st—American Power Conversion InfraStruXure http://www.apcc.com 2nd—Three-way tie: American Power Conversion Smart-UPS, Liebert UPS products, and Tripp Lite UPS products, all write-ins http://www.apc.com, http://www.liebert.com, http://www.tripplite.com

And the “My Bad” Award Goes to... We’re not sure how this happened, but a software product—VERITAS Software’s VERITAS NetBackup Enterprise Server—garnered the most votes in the Enterprise Backup/ Recovery/Archive Hardware subcategory. For obvious reasons, we had to disqualify VERITAS’s entry and instead awarded first place to the hardware product with the most votes. All the same, we commend VERITAS on its customers’ enthusiastic participation in Reader's Choice.

Readers’ Choice 2005 | Disaster Prevention & Recovery Enterprise Backup/Recovery/Archive Service. Many companies, especially small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs) or remote branch offices with limited IT resources, like the convenience and security of using an off-site service to oversee system and data backup, recovery, and archiving. Readers who use such providers named the Iron Mountain Electronic Vaulting service as their favorite. Iron Mountain provides an assortment of services, such as Server Electronic Vaulting, which backs up data continuously; a Web interface that customers use to access backed-up data for recovery and management; an optional onsite backup appliance to speed data recovery; and storage of backed-up data in a secure, offsite facility. Iron Mountain customers typically praise the service for relieving their stretched-thin IT staffs of the time-consuming chore of making and restoring backups. InstantDoc ID 47256

Replication/Data Availability Solution. Readers chose Neverfail Group’s Neverfail for Windows Product Suite as the Best Replication/Data Availability Solution, giving the product a generous 38 percent of votes in this subcategory. The suite includes the core Neverfail Heartbeat replication software as well as modules that provide high-availability and disaster-recovery solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, SharePoint Portal Server, IIS, and Windows file servers. Neverfail also touts the suite as a “cluster-class” solution, referring to the process that replicates data from an active to a passive server, proactively monitors server availability, and automatically fails over to the passive server when the primary server goes offline and switches back to the active server when it’s online again. Readers applaud the Neverfail for Windows Product Suite, saying it’s “a solid, easy-to-use, effective product,” “Good software,” and “It works!” InstantDoc ID 47255

UPS. UPSs are, arguably, the least “sexy” but perhaps most necessary piece of data-protection equipment in your IT shop. Your users probably aren’t thinking about the UPS when the lights flicker during a power surge or when a clap of thunder reverberates, but you know that power protection can mean the difference between hours of work saved and lost. With few exceptions, Windows IT Pro readers voted overwhelmingly for American Power Conversion’s (APC’s) InfraStruXure product for Best UPS. Not merely a traditional UPS, InfraStruXure is an “on-demand architecture” for ensuring network availability, consisting of a modular architecture that can include UPSs, power distribution capabilities, racks, cooling, cabling, cable distribution, and management tools, among other features. The product can fit in environments of all sizes, from wiring closets all the way up to server rooms and small-, medium-, or large-sized data centers. InstantDoc ID 47254 Disaster Prevention & Recovery 47260

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Windows IT Pro

SEPTEMBER 2005

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