OpenText Data Protector Reviews

This is the most difficult difficult question to answer because in order to get certain things done, we need to go to v9 or to a product like Unitrends or Arcserve.

As time goes on, it actually becomes a handicap. It requires too much storage and there are holes where backups should be.

Reporting is definitely an area for improvement, as well as scheduling and the way that pools are created and grouped. Some of these are fixed in v9.

We've used it for approximately eight years. We came from version 6.1 and upgraded to 7.xx.

There were no issues with the deployment.

The integration with MaxDB and MS SQL gave us problems as it is never working the way we expect. As they are certified, we expected it to work flawlessly, but it didn't.

There have been no issues with scaling it.

Once a solution is provided, it works and is OK, but it takes ages to get to that point, mainly due to the fact that we need to supply a lot of data from within a small pipeline, which doesn't always work. I have to admit that now that the new website is up and running, it is better than it was.

No, but we are actively looking for a solution that will put us in the next century. Personally, I believe that v9 combined with dedupe and 3PAR would be a good solution, but it still can't compete with the appliance from Unitrends with backup, storage and deduplication all-in-one.

Reading the manual and following instructions will result in a working version.

Test everything at least twice. Don't listen to others but do the actual tests, even the absurd ones like "suppose I lost my entire backup solution in a fire, let's start from scratch and try to get everything back from tapes and or disks and or remote replica."

I realize that v7 is almost out of support and we are looking to either upgrade or go for a different solution. In my experience with the sales and technical sales from HP, they have no fitting answer for our current solution unless we pay a lot of money for an assessment which will not guarantee anything. So if HP wants to improve their products, then being clearer about their product as a whole it would help. It took me weeks to find out what I could do with HP 3PAR and backups. From my point of view, they need fewer products and more integrated ones, especially backup and storage which are one and the same.

• Low-bandwidth backups
• Deduplicated backup storage with StoreOnce.

Many of my clients have been able to remove tape drives from remote sites.

It has a reputation for bugginess.

I've used it for approximately 20 years, since v2.1.

It's very easy to deploy.

The deduplication stores on Windows are a bit flakey.

There were problems in v7 and earlier, but they have been addressed now.

Customer service is mostly through partner companies, so it depends on which partner you are dealing with.

If you can get to the right support technician, it's good, but it can take a long time to escalate issues high enough in the organisation for them to be addressed.

It's pretty straightforward. It's never more than a few days, even in large environments.

I implement Data Protector for most of my customers myself.

As it is a backup solution, ROI is very hard to measure. How much money did we not lose because we had backups in place?

HP will try to sell you on capacity-based licensing first; make sure that they also quote on "classic" licensing as this can come in much cheaper for large-but-simple environments.

Get an expert to set it up, and it will be good.

I have a multi operating system and multi virtualization platform infrastructure which includes Windows, Linux, HP Unix, VMware, Hyper-V, HP VM, etc. Since HP Data Protector has the capability to do seamless integration with each of the OS's and hypervisors, this makes it a complete solution for my environment. This feature is really valuable for me.

I have been using this product for my customer’s infrastructure. It has helped to keep away backup-related concerns and has provided consistent backup for a long time without intervention and with much less administration. The reporting feature keeps you updated about the backup status. 

I have SUSE XEN virtualization set up in my environment. HP Data Protector does not provide integration with it, and I would like to see it integrate with XEN in a future release. I would also like to see an improvement in its user management. I am still not able to integrate its user authentication with Active Directory even after talking to support from HP.

I have been using HP Data Protector for almost three years.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

The customer support is quite responsive and often able to handle issues technically. In rare cases, the case will be escalated.

I haven't used any other products on such a large scale.

The initial setup was quite easy.

I was able to deploy it myself when I was a first time user of the product. The documentation of the product is quite impressive.

I found the product really useful and it fulfills almost all of my needs which is ROI for me.

Licensing of the product is component-wise; I found it quite expensive when it comes to online backup.

People should consider the infrastructure size and type before selecting the product. It is quite good for managing a multi-technology infrastructure. 

A few of the most valuable features for us are backup and restore, the SQL databases, and the exchange and VM's on tape libraries and disks.

We can do backups and restores easier and quicker than before.

The Virtual Environment component needs to be improved.

We've used it for 10 years.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

Sometimes a few of Data Protector's services do not start automatically even if they are set to do so.

We've had no issues with the scalability.

Technical support is a 9/10.

We just used NTBackup.

The initial setup was straightforward and quite simple.

It has lower prices than its competitors, especially for advanced backup to disk.

We also looked at Veritas Backup Exec.

If you have a heterogeneous environment, then this is the right product for you.

The most valuable feature for us is the central, single pane of glass that allows us to manage our clients without having to log into their systems. It's a really good feature for us.

It reduced the backup times so that the database admins use the backup door to perform restores. Previously, to perform a database refresh, we'd have to wait hours for the restore to complete. Data Protector has reduced that time down to an hour-and-a-half. That's good.

It integrates with the 3PAR product well and with other major vendors such as EMC and NetApp. We use 3PAR, but we haven't fully integrated it with Data Protector yet. Data Protector itself is pretty complete. I'm on version 9.05, the latest version, and I haven't really encountered any deficiencies.

While technically it's a good product, the technical support is an area that could use a lot of improvement. We've had communication issues with support staff being unable to speak English, though I understand that HP's been working on this.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We can have everything up at night so that the database admins can kick off backup jobs automatically, whereas previously the jobs were stuck in the process. The database is backed up every 15 minutes and there are roughly 1,600 backup jobs per day that go through the system. It's quite reliable, more so than other solutions we've used.

We've had no issues scaling it.

Although we're lucky in that we haven't really had to contact technical support, it's quite variable when we've called in. Many of them don't speak English very well, so communication is a definite issue. I know they're trying to improve in this area because they've asked me.

Once you understand how the pieces fit together, it makes sense. When we purchased Data Protector, we also purchased installation assistance. I'd certainly recommend that to get the setup right. Information transfer is very important.

We implemented with a vendor team, which I'd recommend because they'll train you or install it for you themselves.

They have a small charge for client licenses, which is good. It depends on what licensing model you have, whether you have a capacity-based licensing or have to pay for each separate component.

It works best if you've also combined it with StoreOnce. You could use it with Data Domain, too. A lot of customers still have Cape by Verizon, and we wanted to get away from that and go to a digital solution. If you're going through a digital solution, I would recommend you include StoreOnce at the time of purchase. We didn't do that. StoreOnce actually does come with the product, so you can do a software StoreOnce. That works okay. You get better performance if you have a physical device than going through a software StoreOnce.

Obviously, it depends on your budget, too, and that's really the reason why we didn't purchase the physical StoreOnce when we got the Data Protector. It would be better if you can get it all together.

The most valuable feature is the ability to recover individual files. It's a quick process that takes very little time. It also provides the ability to manage other tape backup systems remotely from a centralized server.

It's given us the flexibility to recover individual files, which is important to us because we have a lot of end users who have the tendency to accidentally delete files on the shared drives. We're able to locate which tape the files are on. It's a pretty straightforward process.

We have a disaster recovery site and I'm trying to figure out how to export the internal database from our named site manage to disaster recovery site manager, that took some time. I wrote a script that's working, but it's kind of a cumbersome script to export the internal database and import it in our disaster recovery site. I have that script going everyday. If something happens, we have the latest database with our recovered data at a different site. But this is not a good process, so it would be good to have it streamlined.

I've used it for five months.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It's been pretty stable. I haven't had any instances of crashes.

We've had no issues scaling it.

Technical support is OK. They helped me with exporting our internal database. They responded to me within a reasonable time, but the person with whom I spoke didn't really know how to do or understand what I was doing. I had to figure it out on my own.

Learning the ins and outs of the application itself will take some time to wrap your head around, but once you do it's pretty easy to manage overall. It's a pretty straightforward product.

This is our only backup product and we've used it since the beginning because HP was a partner of our organization.

It seems to me that HP is not focused in their backup and recovery division. They're going to release other products which integrates with Data Protector and which use special licenses for functions that Data Protector already can do. I wish they'd focus on one product that does everything, and that product should be Data Protector.

One particular improvement I'd like to see with Data Protector is the user management. A user in a group is limited to only some rules without rights to do more backup and recovery functions.

We've had no issues deploying it.

Data Protector is absolutely stable for us. We have no issues with instability.

We only have one terminal shelf so we have only one data center, but they are all backed up, so scalability works just fine. We don't really have a large environment to manage.

I think their support is OK, but not very good. The problem is that Data Protector is spread across so many hardware and software combinations that its development can't keep pace with all the changes in heterogeneous environments. So we have issues with IBM DB2 databases. The integration with Data Protector was old and unstable.

The release cycle for Data Protector was way too fast for customers, going from 7 to 8 to 9. When we had issues, they instructed us to upgrade to version 9, and then we had two or three more problems. We could never fix every problems because new ones kept coming up.

It's been better in the last year, however, because version 9 seems to be stable with some patches.

It's a very good product for backup and recovery. You should do the trial for 30 or 60 days and implement it on Linux or Windows, but not UNIX

We purchased it as part of a package with StoreOnce. Its integration with StoreOnce was probably the key selling point for us and made us choose Data Protector and not one of the other products on the market that don't natively support StoreOnce. There's quite a wide range of application integrations, for example, with SQL Server, Exchange, and Hyper-V.

It's allowed us to reliably perform backups without a whole lot of constant attention required. Again, the integrations with SQL Server, Exchange, and Hyper-V are reliable and effective. The integration with SQL Server 2012 is particularly well-executed.

Data Protector is a fairly complicated product and some of the terminology is quite complex. There is a bit of a learning curve for new administrators who are working on it. Some of that could be eased by having a better GUI, which is not very good. There isn't much good reporting built-in to the GUI. For example, to see the status of yesterday's Exchange backup you have to click on and view all of the possible numbered backup sessions from yesterday until you find the one that relates to Exchange.

I've used it for 18 months.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We have become frequent customers of the Data Protector technical support team because Data Protector does fairly regularly break. And it does so, generally, without any involvement on our part. The software is not as stable and reliable as it should be.

Invariably, the response from technical support to that is to install the latest set of patches for Data Protector. It's very frequently patched. Upgrading to the next patch release is quite a big task because you also have to upgrade all of the components running on all of the backup targets at the same time.

We've had no issues with scalability.

While they're fairly knowledgable, they're not very responsive. The turnaround time on critical tickets can be many days. First-level support is not very knowledgable, so virtually everything ends up going up to second-level support, who are, quite obviously, overworked.

Generally, once you're talking to someone, it's a reasonably good experience. But the response times aren't as good as they should be.

Technical support for Data Protector isn't as good as with 3PAR, the Blade platform, and the ProLiant servers. Support for those, 3PAR in particular, is noticeably better.

We previously used Tivoli Storage Manager, which was similar in complexity to Data Protector but less reliable. Tivoli required daily care and attention to keep it running. Data Protector, while imperfect, is significantly more reliable than Tivoli was for us.

I'd say for a typical organization of our size, where you're not able to send someone on multiple training courses and make them the full-time "backup guy", it's probably going to be a project that requires external consultancy. There are very many moving parts. It's a complicated architecture with confusing and not-always-consistent terminology.

Data Protector is a little bit more complicated than it should be. I think most people would probably agree that there's no such thing as good backup software, but Data Protector is certainly not the worst that we've used. It could be more reliable. It could be a little easier to understand. It could have a better user-interface, with better reporting. But in terms of actually, reliably, backing things up, it's superior to the other products that we've used in-house.