OpenText Data Protector Reviews

The most valuable feature is the Integration with Oracle, MSSQL and Exchange. They are the easiest to work with.

Unlike some other backup solutions, the configuration and restoration of the data is really easy. Just check it and you are done. We don't have to meddle with configuration files or create several of them, as is the case with IBM Spectrum Protect.

The mailbox restore works wonderfully on Data Protector. The RMAN scripts created by the solution save a lot of time for the database department.

The process to restore a database from one server to another got really easy. It improved the amount of requests the backup administration unit could attend to.

They could really improve on the integrity. A lot of times I get the log error or no log message. To get my data, I have to scan the tape. It's not really the best way to go with the product. It should be more robust.

I have used this solution since 2013.

The server is stable. The issues are regarding what was saved. Sometimes you have to read the tape to get what was saved.

The migration to Data Protector 9 was a nightmare. Migrating to another version is really complicated. Adding more servers is easy.

When I tried to migrate the catalog, the history of backups got lost. HPE was working on a fix.

It's important that data history remains in all migrations. Otherwise, the solution cannot be used on environments with long expiration dates, such as in a bank where data must be kept for ten years.

Technical support is not the best. They take a lot of time to solve complex problems, but at least you know they are trying their best.

I used IBM Spectrum Protect for over five years. The company switched because the licensing costs were large.

The installation was really straightforward. Just check the integration and you are done. The only consideration is that you must have a really powerful profile to do all the installations.

Data Protector has one of the most flexible and affordable prices. I suggest the following:

• Always check the expiration timeframe for the data
• Keep the SLA actualized for every unit
• Avoid backing up data without control and for longer period of times than needed

We evaluated Veritas NetBackup, IBM Spectrum Protect, and Microfost.

It's a great product. You must read the logs every day to be sure that everything runs smoothly. It is really easy to backup and restore your data across all servers, something that IBM Spectrum Protect struggles to do.

The granularity of brick-level restore functionality is very valuable. We receive approximately 10 restore requests on a daily basis for your typical file/folder restore, with the odd Exchange mailbox restore request thrown in, just to keep me on my toes.

Backing up to disk (HPE StoreOnce 4900) has been valuable in reducing the man-hours in managing the backups, with the added bonus of backup replication for all jobs to the opposite HPE StoreOnce. Historically, all our backups onsite backed up directly to LT04 tapes. This method brought a lot of its own challenges: tape management, costs, man-hours; not to forget having to ensure all our backups completed within the scheduled backup window throughout the week/weekend was tight.

The reporting capabilities of HPE Data Protector are very limited and is the main area I feel that HPE Data Protector needs to improve on. The standard report options available with the product are adequate for generic reporting.

However, if you’re like me and want to get customised reporting, you then have a problem and you will need to purchase another licensed product: HPE Data Protector Reporter.

I have used HPE Data Protector for six years.

Deployment of our new HPE Data Protector 9 environment went quite smoothly, even with the addition of our HPE StoreOnce appliances, which were new to me and required a lot of planning in regards to scheduling/creation of backup stores, etc. Our HPE consultant was very helpful in assisting me in the execution of the new environment.

Part of this project was a requirement to migrate all the servers and data from the legacy Cell Manager (DP7) across to the new Cell Manager (DP9). This project has been very frustrating, as it has been fraught with technical issues. The main issue was a corrupt IDB (DP7). HPE support had worked on this issue for a long time. They had our entire environment in their labs and to date have not been able to resolve the IDB corruption. Currently, we are working with one of the HPE consultants to manage the export of the data via a custom script. Time will tell how successful this migration will be, but until then, I will just have to continue managing two onsite production DP environments.

I rate them 4/5. I cannot fault their customer service. Luckily, our customer service team is in the same locale as us, which is very helpful. Small things like this make a big difference to the customer service experience.

Technical support gets 4/5. Mainly, the technical support is very good. You kind of have your preferred support guys working on your cases, than some of the other guys. Some of my own company’s users probably say similar about me and our team, but hey, that’s the way it goes!

The implementation team gets 4/5. Implementation was through HPE consultancy.

Over the course of the deployment I had two different consultants. The first consultant got a promotion within HPE and the second consultant was from Italy. I now have a 3rd local Eire based HPE consultant that will be assisting and guiding me on the legacy IDB migration. I look forward to working with him, as his knowledge of the DP is outstanding.

It’s important to get your licensing right as this will drastically Influence the pricing.

Consider the following:

• How much Data is getting backed up on a weekly basis?
• What are your Data retention policies?
• How many different types of Integrations, i.e. Oracle DB’s /SQL /Exchange /SharePoint/VMware, etc., your company has? (These numbers could influence the licensing model you adopt, as the more integrations you have – the capacity licensing model may be the most cost effective.)

Luckily for me, I inherited HPE Data Protector.

I have evaluated other backup products for some of our overseas remote sites and found Veeam Backup and Replication 9 to be the best product to meet our needs.

Implement the B2D technology, i.e. HPE StoreOnce, depending on your company setup. If a DR/FO is a requirement, consider another HPE StoreOnce in the DR/FO site and avail of the HPE StoreOnce replication capabilities.

Invest in HPE consultancy to help plan out the environment.

The most valuable feature is the ability to back up to tape. We can quickly restore files that have been deleted or are missing from the system.

It allows us to be more flexible with how we do our system backups.

We would like to have a direct plugin to VMware.

It could also be simplified, made more usable and manageable.

In the current version, it is very stable. We are currently a couple of versions behind. At this stage, it's very stable.

It's designed for enterprise businesses. We're a small to medium business. It's more than perfect for us.

I haven’t used technical support in the last couple of years.

We have always been using Data Protector.

Because of the version we were on, it was quite complex at the beginning.

I would advise colleagues to try it. If it fits their system, then go for it.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor was cost.

Using it on smartphones and laptops is valuable. Now I have seen a new version of the HPE smartphone and it is fantastic. Syncing among devices is very interesting to me.

It takes less time. You need fewer passwords. You need less of everything else. You have everything in one space; you can control everything: your payments, your business, your email, and so on.

It is stable. It is always up.

It is scalable. I think it would be a great idea to show it to my colleagues and have them join us in using it.

I have a special group, IT support. After some training, maybe it will be fully supported for us.

The initial setup was complex in terms of IT, the business, and our technical support. I think it is possible for us.

I would recommend this product to a colleague.

The most important thing to me is that I can trust the vendor. I never feel that I am on my own without support.

The most valuable feature is the integration with the infrastructure layer, for example, to storage systems like 3PAR. That is really valuable because you can use functions in the hardware platform to integrate with the functionalities in the Data Protector.

It provides secure and high availability platforms.

The organizations I work with that use the product are actually managing to get a higher availability figure. They can design their infrastructure to manage it in an easier way, so they need to spend less hours of management.

I would like to see more integrations with virtual environments and more integrations with platforms like SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP.

The stability is excellent, actually. It more or less depends on how often they release new versions, but the stability is extremely good.

The scalability could be a bit better, actually, because that connects to the stability question. You don't enforce new functionalities in a stable product unless you're willing to accept some disturbances or destabilization of the product.

The technical support is very good. They have both local and central skilled technical resources, so it's very valuable.

We needed to move towards a new system because of the complexity in the environment. We were looking for ease of use.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We also considered Veeam and NetBackup. We chose HPE Data Protector because it is easy to use.

When you evaluate products, take one important aspect, for example, ease of use; and then try to focus on that aspect when you compare it to different vendors.

We use this solution for data deduplication. It also has the media library, so our disk-to-disk backup is also backed up to the tape. If there is data corruption in the disk-to-disk backup, we will have a copy on the tape.

Other solutions do not have this feature. If data corruption happens without this feature, you will be in trouble.

It is easy to recover our backup data using Data Protector.

I would like to have more capacity. This can be done by having more deduplication and compression. If they can compress the data more and more, we will save more space. We won’t need to pay for more and more space, especially in the Oracle databases, where we don’t get much compression.

I would like to see them address this issue, so we can have the Oracle database compressed to the maximum level.

The product is stable. We have had some issues here and there, but we have good people in support who can help us.

This tool is scalable.

In general, technical support is fine.

When it comes to hardware support, HPE will help you in a minimal amount time.

When in comes to software problems, you do not know when they will close your issues. They are unpredictable in terms of when they will get back to you. They are slower with software issues than with hardware issues.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We are evaluating EMC.

In addition to low cost, I am looking for stable systems.

When looking for a vendor, we look at the financial thing. We are looking to reduce costs. From the technical side, most of the competitors have the same technical capabilities. From the technical side, you can get what you are looking for here or there.

The most valuable feature for me is the number of agents available to back up our data.

It provides one solution for all our backup needs.

We could use the ability to do snapshots for mass storage systems.

The stability is very good.

Technical support is very good.

The initial setup was 12 years ago. That’s a long time ago.

I would advise colleagues to have a look at it, and maybe to choose it.

The most important criterion when we select a vendor is the catalog of products, quality of the product, and the price.

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.