Compression of standard backups is quite good and speed is pretty good too. I want to add additional comments here after the product has been in production use for 6 months - the total footprint of our backups has reduced drastically. It is far better than the native SQL compressed backup utility, and even though we are seeing approximately 1.4 : 1 de-duplication ratio (using compression at Level 3) we've saved so much space that we still have more than 33% free space on our backup appliances.
Idera treats a backup of a SQL Server as if it is essentially a single backup job of each individual database. You can't see any metrics about how long it took you to backup the entire server. It doesn't handle restoration to different drives very easily, and it won't create folder structures if they don't exist already. It cannot be used to implement replication on another instance without first converting files back into SQL Server .bak files. There appears to be LOTs of shortcomings. [All of these short-comings are still very much present even after 6 months of feedback to Idera. No solution is in sight.] Still has a focus on individual databases and not for entire server recoveries. Have tried adjusting max threads values, but it seems to have little affect and Idera is still researching the issue.
