OpenText Data Protector Reviews

For various customers, Micro Focus Data Protector was used for backup and restore.

As a technology consultant, I used to deliver projects, and we used to have some concerns about the previous version versus the latest version. Based on that, we had our release going through on these products, which we overcame, and we even succeeded in getting upgraded from the older versions to the latest versions.

Customers wanted to upgrade from the previous version to the latest version, either on a Windows platform or on a Linux platform as well. They used to have multi-vendor storage boxes as well, and they wanted to know if it was compatible with this new version. 

They occasionally had an older version or older storage boxes that were incompatible. Based on that, we simply had the most recent support methods and shared them.

They were attempting to access the new storage, and we tried to find where they were stuck to support those issues.

The most valuable features of this solution were the features we worked most with which were telemetry, and the scheduler. We just had to onboard where we only had a few basic terms.

Most features we worked on were on a web console, but they still lack almost all of the features.

The other route was where they just wanted to learn more about cloud storage and where they wanted to go to applications, auto applications from local storage to cloud, but we couldn't give them the solutions because we didn't have certain enough features, facilities, in our lab environment where we could just work out our good R&D, and so on. But we failed in that situation because we were not given these solutions. That is something we could have done.

We have so many specific technological cracks in Micro Focus, but we are not getting the features, facilities, or coordination between the global delivery centers and the R&D team that we need to express our ideas. 

If they can overtake these, either they can go through R&Ds or they can allow us to go through R&Ds it would be helpful. Because we couldn't find certain lab environments where we could just try to succeed in those environments because we can't always go test in the customer environment.

When a technology consultant provides an idea, it is because they have just gone through the customer environment, they have gone through the lock and et cetera, they are well versed with those, and all they need now are some solutions. However, if I need to work with R&Ds, we don't have those solution architects who can help us manage, test, and implement those environments. 

That is where we fall short. We couldn't find an environment where we could simply try to go through testing and then implement it in the customer locations.

DP is a very user-friendly product, and we are transitioning to a web-based environment. It works because we don't have to go through a platform that is dependent on each cell manager individually. Rather, we can try to create a platform-independent solution, such as a portal that can be accessed from anywhere.

That is one option where I can work out in more central environments where I can just try to manage. We have a number of features where if we find a web portal and a good tool managing the number of devices and even just trying to configure along with a centralized medium and database, CMDB, we have a number of features. We have a very good feature going through centralizing media management, centralizing cell managers, and then working on a centralized media where we can just try to manage them to a cloud, which works very well because it is a centralized environment where we can pitch into it.

I was only working with Micro Focus Data Protector. I recently resigned and was transferred out of Micro Focus just two days ago.

It has not been longer than a year. We only recently started using 10.91 before upgrading from the previous version. And we recently worked on version 11 as well, which we successfully upgraded.

I had been working with Micro Focus Data Protector for 15 years, and I'm currently using DP 10.52.

I used to even deliver the training and travel across EMEA, I used to travel across Apigee, and we used to deliver the training and even collect their solutions. So we used to provide solutions, training, and even take over projects, as well as deliver and clear up their projects.

I was employed by Micro Focus until last week.

Micro Focus Data Protector is a stable solution.

This product is extremely good. When compared to other storage or backup tools on the market, it is extremely competitive. Most of them are preferable because they are user-friendly, have multi-vendor support, and also support cloud platforms. And we're going through the cloud as well as local storage. We have many specific visibilities, but we couldn't get the chance to explore everything in detail.

Micro Focus Data Protector is scalable.

No one has bothered to take care of the product because we have only been working on it for the last 15 years and most of the customers were satisfied and were using it.

They had been using third-party products, but they recently migrated to this product because it was user-friendly, easy to manage, and agent-based. We used to even convince them that we worked on cross platforms and so on because it is the only platform that supports cross-platform, backups, disaster recoveries via sites, auto applications, synchronization, and consolidation.

We have a number of different features and facilities in the product, but we haven't been able to find any such compatible people, those who can simply guide us or even just go through that. But, yeah, we just stayed in these places.

I can apologize to technical support because we were better than they were.

We would take a large amount of time. But now we see that most of them are extremely valuable. They understand the product, but they are not aware of the product.

Before we had very good people who would work out and give us the results. But now I see, I asked one of the results if I should just consider ITOL, and one of my customers recently stated that they would like to have a language for Portuguese, but I don't believe that language has become available. They have expressed regret that we are not providing adequate support.

Support is poor, I would rate it a two out of five.

I was experimenting with various monitoring tools. Working with SDM, Structure Data Manager, and Data Protector with automation and integrations.

Here, we have only worked with business clients. We had worked with customers who had complications, and we had customers who were in the early stages of either a fresh setup or a very complex configurations going through the very old versions of an agent and also the different vendor-specific storage boxes.

Most of them are no longer supported. They have only worked on older versions, such as six, version six, or 5.5. 

Now they want to import the data into the new service, and we provided them with a solution to import the data. We were successful in one of the customer locations. We used to do fictitious R&Ds because we didn't have the platform to work out and be comfortable and confident in those concepts.

Pricing depends on the licensing. Again, because now we are just going through different licensing, going through premium licensing, where we used to just call it a traditional base, we used to even have a capacity-based and et cetera here, but now we have some licensing confusions here. Because the customer now says, "We used to work on previous versions and still have active licenses available, so why don't we migrate or use those active licenses when we decide to upgrade?"

We have a lot of questions where we get confused because we just say it's possible. The theory suggests that it is not possible because we just tried it when we went to the customer and asked them to upgrade from version nine to version eleven. According to theory, if we want to upgrade from version 9 to version 11, we must first go from 9 to 10.4 and then to 11. But we did R&D, and we were able to export and import IDBs, and we were successful by migrating IDB and upgrading directly from nine to eleven. We succeeded.

We were concerned because we were unable to obtain the necessary support. DP is an extremely useful tool.

We have many competitors who are pricing better, and we believe that our pricing is higher. They used to customize those based on the product when they just wanted our pricing because I only see most of the licensing team. Because when I was working from HPE to Micro Focus, HPE had hardware as well as licensing, and they used to manage to go through the imagines between hardware and licensing, which was manageable.

Micro Focus is purely software, and we don't have that margin where we can reduce the licensing terms or the licensing cost. We lagged because most of them just wanted to go through traditional licensing, they just wanted to go with express licensing because most of the processes were going through virtualization, and so on. 

We definitely need to improve the price for licensing, in my opinion.

I would rate the pricing a three out of five.

My advice to new implementers is to please first try to understand the current environment and try to find out the prerequisites before proceeding with the solutions. Because most of them don't go with the existing environment, they just start implementing the new environment without understanding their setups. 

In my opinion, we should first try to understand the setup with their environment team, understand what all of their requirements are, and then proceed based on that. 

It depends on whether they're going through an enterprise hardware level, virtualization, or even a cloud. My concerns from what I have observed are once we have implemented, they later ask if we have certain features or capabilities available when they should have considered including these features as well before the implementation.

The issue is that the customer is not convinced by the sales team that the features are available and that they can go with these features, to test their environment. 

My suggestion is for the sales team to go into their environment, understand their requirements, and then talk about what features we have in our product to give them a clear idea that this is what the environment, this is what the features you may be expecting in your environment. We failed because our sales teams were unable to persuade them in the proper manner.

I would rate Micro Focus Data Protector a ten out of ten. 

This is the only product where the majority of them are unsure, either because of the features, which we only have here or because of the manner in which they have been convinced. But when I just work practically and try to convince customers, they are happy with the features that we have in the product. When we approach new customers, they say that it does not include certain features.

But when I try to convince them that we do have these features, and please let us know what features we need to have in order to compete with third-party products. I hope we have many features in DP, rather than going through because we are now going through a block-based system. If we go through file system backups, a number of integrations, and even big data, we are getting close. I think this is the most wonderful type of feature for what we currently have in Data Protector, where we can explore these things.

When it's installed, the most valuable feature is ease of use. It's a little tricky to install straight out of the box and configure, because of the way the licensing module works. Once you get beyond that, it's very easy to use.

We don't utilize it the way it's supposed to be used. It's kind of like a back stop. For example, if an engineer accidentally deletes something, he raises a ticket and with a request to get his file back. Normally, the backup routines are run, and that's what we use Data Protector for. We just dive into that, pull it back, and say, there are half a dozen backups, and ask which one he wants. He says, "I want the one before I made the changes." We can't just apply a mindset here, or read his mind. They can drill it down to specifics. We can then drill the tool down to specifics. It does that process, and it does it well.

I know I am being picky, but the only thing that really tripped us up is the license model. It’s a wonderful product, but if they could change that model, it would be great.

I would like to get everything for 60 days, so I can turn on all the features that I want. I can get it all set up and then broadcast a message to somebody at HPE or their distributors. We could sort out our licensing then, because we will have time to work out what we want to do, and get it honed up first. Because we're all moving to a service base, it would make sense to do it that way.

To be honest, I don't think Backup Exec comes anywhere close to this tool in terms of stability. When you match it, and you use Backup Exec and Veeam together, you can get kind of close to this tool. However, you still don't get the granularity of the data. This solution is awesome. It is leaps ahead of Backup Exec, leaps ahead.

We haven’t had to scale it, but the way it's set up, it can be scaled. Although my distributor will correct me, I do think it comes down to the licensing. The current license model isn’t complicated, but then it's not straightforward either.

What you have to do, and my distributor will shoot me down for saying this if I get it wrong, but you license the box or your data. Then you license the device you want to put your stuff on. If you want to scale it, you've then got to jump through the hoops to get the right licenses, and then go from there. That's one of the things that we hit first off. Once we got it up and running, it’s easy to use.

What we wanted was disk-to-disk replication. After we got that nailed down, we then wanted to replicate from disk to tape. We were told that we can't do that. We asked why not, and then we were told it doesn't let you do it unless you buy it with a license. That's what hurt, because then we have to go back through the loop of giving the business justifications. This just added to the frustration.

To be honest, I didn't actually talk to anyone. The information that we needed was on the HPE website, so it was good that we didn't need to talk anyone. I dare say we would have had to talk to somebody in a different time zone. My distributor, who shall remain nameless, was actually quite helpful because what he said was, "Right before we start dialing numbers, eight hours back that way, jump on the HPE website, and see if you can find it there." We did find it.

We viewed several things. We initially started off with Backup Exec, and then we had a homegrown thing which didn't work. This tool and Backup Exec will only run when you tell them to. We were frustrated with that because the engineers, being engineers, don't care. They just want their data and they want it now.

You can't do that in a backup environment. You have to plan, schedule, tell it what and when to monitor. We went forward with that. The only thing that even came close to doing what we wanted was Data Protector. So that is what we purchased.

We proved the tool as follows. We took quite a few of the senior management and told them we are going to stage a real-life crisis, without the rest of the staff knowing. We just turned the storage off. Everybody screamed and we asked, "Who needs what? What do you need? When do you need it?” We starting using the Data Protector service and we retrieved what they wanted. It took us two hours, but that two hours proved the point that Data Protector was the tool for us.

The setup was a little complex. You follow the steps, which are very logical and straightforward. However, once you get beyond that, you start to define your backup process and that's when you fall over. If you haven't put a lot of thought in that up front, such as defining that you want to perform disk-to-disk backup and then replicate to tape.

In our justification, we didn't make that clear. When we went to talk to our business distributor, we were then given our disk-to-disk setup. Then we wanted to change to disk to app, so we had to repeat the painful process again.

We kind of matrixed it out, and said, "These do that, this does that." Every time we asked, "What's this Data Protector? What's that Data Protector?" By the time we'd done that little exercise, it became very clear how to proceed.

I suggest getting Data Protector or lose my friendship. All kidding aside, if a colleague asked me for advice, I would say to seriously consider it.

Other tools come close, but what you have to realize, with everything that's happening, going forward, you'd be daft to consider other options, especially if you're on a HPE platform.

If you were running this tool on a Dell site stack, instead of HPE, it might be a different scenario. The HPE site stack can guarantee that there are no “gotchas” in there. If you're running Dell, then you would see that maybe it's not the product for you. Maybe you want something that is Dell equivalent, but I would still suggest giving Data Protector a darn good look. This solution does exactly what it says on the tin. I know that sounds cheesy, but the solution works as advertised.

When looking for a vendor, I look for know-how, support, and ease of use.

Due to some management issues, we're moving to Data Domain.

The solution is easy to use. The management of the product is also easy.

We faced some certification issues after we upgraded to version 10.2.

I have been using the solution for around 16 years.

The tool is stable. I rate the stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a seven out of ten. Our clients are medium-sized businesses.

The initial setup is easy. I rate the ease of setup a nine out of ten. The deployment takes around half an hour.

The licensing cost is too high. It costs us a lot when we migrate with the appliance.

We have migrated the solution with an appliance. We are in a transition phase to use Data Domain. I recommend the solution for its ease of use. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is integration with the HP storage unit. There is an HP product line called HP High-End Storage. We are primarily using Micro Focus Data Protector for SAP RT application, which is an earlier version. 

Integration with HP storage is a very strong point for Micro Focus Data Protector. 

It is the best solution for general operations like backup and restore. Zero downtime backup (ZDB) is one very important feature, which is basically the integration with the storage array. It is a very strong feature. We're using storage with snapshots with this integration. 

In general, you can say that Micro Focus Data Protector is behind in capabilities when compared with other backup solutions, such as Commvault, Symantec, NetBackup, but it is very strong for certain use cases such as array integration. We are using it in production even now.

There should be some kind of cloud integration and archiving solutions. I think this is the area they need to focus on.

We have been using Micro Focus Data Protector for six to seven years. 

We have been using HP solutions, comprising HP servers, storage, and even the HP operating system unit, for five to seven years. Micro Focus Data Protector was configured and installed during the last tech research around six to seven years ago, and it is still in production. Currently, we have replaced the solution with some other solution, but for the older tech research, Micro Focus Data Protector is still working.

We're relying on this backup for our very critical core application. It's really good all the time for backup and restore operations. We never faced any issue. You can say it is a very smooth and stable experience.

Scalability of Micro Focus Data Protector is good. There may be tens of thousands of users currently in our company.

The technical support is really good. They're always very cooperative and really very good. The support experience is actually very good.

I was not there at that time. It shouldn't actually take much time, maybe a few weeks or one month.

It was deployed by HP. Their deployment team installed and configured everything.

It is a very good product if you want to go for the ZDB backup or the array integration with HP products. In general, when comparing Micro Focus Data Protector with other backup solutions, such as Commvault, NetBackup, or any other vendor, they are much more comprehensive and have much more capabilities.

I would rate Micro Focus Data Protector a seven out of ten.

ZDB, and instant recovery. Also, it will do both physical and virtual backups with Hyper-V and ESXi.

Using the backup storage snapshot functionality we are able to back up 2T databases and 2T file storage fast.

Hyper-V backups need improvement so they can do GRE.

I've used it for five years.

We have a very complex and unusual environment so it took a while to get things working.

Since we started using v5, stability has improved quite a bit.

This has also improved since earlier versions.

We have very good customer service.

We pay for premier support and it is great, but it's not so good if you just have regular support.

We used Tivoli and it did not work well in our environment. Data Protector was cheaper and would do what we needed to do.

It was complex. We had a consultant in for several weeks to get us working. We needed to get the ZDB type, and virtual backups working. The file system backups were no problem.

We had a vendor team, and the main person is still the most knowledgeable one I know for what we needed.

You get what you pay for so don’t skimp.

We had it included in a large purchase we were making at the time.

If you are just doing straight file system backups, this product is straightforward, but if you use any of the many features I would suggest getting help. The interface could be improved and it doesn’t have some things that other products do, but it would depend on what you need from your backups/restores and what your window is.

The GUI is nice. However, the command line options are more important when setting up customize backups and restores in a custom scripts routine.

We are required to send sensitive information offsite, and Data Protector has made it easy to meet this requirement.

Better documentation on how to backup the device itself through a flash drive or CD.

I've used HP Data Protector, formerly OmniBack, since 1997.

No issues encountered.

No problems after I upgraded to v7. On version 6.10, it would not bar-scan a pool correctly. After upgrading, I no longer had the issue.

No issues encountered. What I like about it is that you are licensed per drives not how many clients/agents are installed. It can support various filesystem types (HFS, VXFS, Windows, etc.), and use a databases utility like RMAN to backup to other disk or tapes.

9.5/10.

9.5/10.

For the projects I support, I used Data Protector. Other projects used BackupExec. However; Backup Exec is very limited of what it can support in filesystem types and even operating system support matrix.

It's straightforward for me.

We implemented it through an in-house team of only one member. They were very knowledgeable, with over 20+ years of system administrator experience and knowledge.

My personal satisfaction is that the products work as intended.

The licensing is based on your primary purpose, what type of cloning environment you are utilizing, and if it is a disk to disk copy etc. The technical assistance should help with your decision.

Evaluated Backup Exec and it is limited in what it supports.

Evaluate your need first of all. We are a small government shop, and the needs are limited here. However, Data Protector can do much more.

The simplicity of the software since when it was deployed makes the training easy for the backup operators (there is a big rotation of employees in this area).

The file system backup (by far, the most used) is the most valuable feature.

Integration with the market applications must be improved, such as MS Exchange, MS Active Directory, SAP and Oracle. Other backup tools are more efficient with the integrated backups.

We encountered some stability issues. Before 2014, the system run over HPE-UX platform when some software issues were recurrent. After it moved to the x86 platform, these were reduced a lot (almost to zero).

There were some scalability issues. In the older version 7.0, we reached the clients limit (500, if I'm not wrong).

I would rate the technical support a six out of 10. The ticket takes too long to be forwarded to the superior levels of support.

Since I have been working in my company, we have been using this software.

The setup was simple, i.e., both the setup and the administration are simple. That's one of the advantages (maybe the only one) of the HPE Data Protector.

Before, we did not look at other solutions, but now we are analyzing other solutions, e.g., probably Veeam, Commvault and Veritas.

The HPE Data Protector may not be enough to support your RPO/RTO needs, specifically for application integrated backups. Possibly, some complementary solutions will also be needed.

What we find most valuable in Micro Focus Data Protector is that it provides Japanese data protection, for example, it protects information such as the full Japanese name, address, etc.

We have a lot of requests for the Micro Focus team, particularly in terms of the Japanese data pattern, as it's not as good now. The Japanese data pattern accuracy of the Micro Focus Data Protector needs to be improved because there are a lot of false negatives and false positives. We are currently testing this and our product team has been communicating with the Micro Focus team.

What we'd like to see in the next release of the solution is better compatibility with other products, apart from a more accurate Japanese data pattern.

I've been dealing with Micro Focus Data Protector for two years.

Micro Focus Data Protector, in terms of stability, is not so bad.

I'm not sure how scalable Micro Focus Data Protector is because the DLP service goes through my company's SaaS product.

There's no need for me to contact technical support for Micro Focus Data Protector because my company's product team is there to answer my questions.

I didn't use a different solution before using Micro Focus Data Protector. It is a first for me.

The deployment for Micro Focus Data Protector was easy.

Pricing for Micro Focus Data Protector is reasonable.

My company and its customers use Micro Focus Data Protector, though I'm not sure which version of the solution is being used. It's deployed on the public cloud and via a SaaS service.

My rating for Micro Focus Data Protector is eight out of ten.

I'm a reseller of Micro Focus Data Protector.