OpenText Data Protector Reviews

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 valuable features are the ability to:

• Backup data
• Write to D2Ds
• Utilize D2D compression technology

We write TBs and TBs of data to backend HPE D2Ds. It then dedupes all the information so we get a 10:1 ratio of deduplication. This means we can store a heck of a lot more data on less storage. It saves us time and money.

The benefit is that we've got data retention and we can store data for people. We are a financial services organization, so we are audited on the level of security of our data. This solution allows us to prove that we are storing it correctly.

I'd like the ability to search backups a lot easier. I'd like the ability to search for a particular server within a backup because people come to you and ask for the backup of a server. They talk about it in those terms. You end up trying to find out where that server is located for a particular job that you might have set up months ago. It would be good to have a search feature where you could ask, "Server X, what backup job is that?" That would be helpful.

It would be good if it worked properly and it actually gave you usable error codes.
A large percentage of the time, you get very vague messages, or it just turns off, and it never tells you why. It's very difficult to decipher what happened and what has gone wrong.

The problem with HPE Data Protector is when it goes wrong, it's very hard to fathom why it went wrong.

It's pretty scalable. Now we're on HPE Data Protector version 9.0, so you only have a single Cell Manager. We roll out globally so there's no issues with that side of it.

We have to raise support tickets and that's an extremely painful thing. It can take five to seven weeks. That's the bad side of it. It is difficult to get decent support and to get to the people who know what they're talking about.

Initially, the technical support is terrible. You raise a call and then you are asked for log after log. What you want is someone who knows what they're doing who can help you right away. When you finally get through to those people a month later, they can normally resolve your issues within an hour. However, getting to them is very difficult.

We were already using it when I came to the company. I was more involved in the decision to upgrade.

I was involved with the setup and it was reasonably straightforward. You install Cell Manager, then you create distribution servers, and then you roll out to a virtual machine. It's a pretty straightforward process.

We're probably going to have to start thinking about alternatives. Our data footprint is growing so rapidly that we're going to need to look at new solutions anyway. We have backup jobs that are over ten TBs for a single server. We need ways in which we can restore that data quickly.

We use 3PAR, so we're going to start looking at deduplication on it. We need snapshotting, and that sort of stuff. We've got to start looking at how we do things and how we can do them differently and faster. It may or not be with HPE.

When it works, it works well. When it doesn't work, it can be very frustrating.
I would look across the whole marketplace and see what's out there.

It’s a very user friendly, easy to understand restore platform. The good thing about DP is that there is a Windows GUI version. This saves a lot of time and effort when one is learning on recovering using commands. The report generated by DP is very detailed as well.

It gives a good overview of which tape library and tape drives are connected, and gives you the ability to restore selected portions of the tape and not necessarily the whole tape. You can even control the tape library using this software.

When you unplug a laptop with the GUI version from the network, the restoration status will be terminated and will not update even if you try to connect it back. Which means to say, that I need to leave my laptop on and connected throughout the whole restore process, so that I can keep track of the restore status. There could have been an existing workaround for this, not that I know of one.

I haven't had any issues with deployment.

See the above Areas for Improvement.

I haven't had any issues with scalability.

Overall, when compared with other restore solutions, I can say most of the good features are packed inside a software that has a small footprint.

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.

The most valuable features include Sharepoint item-level restore and integration with the vSphere hypervisor.

It provides us with more assurances that the backup procedure is actually working.

The user interface as the GUI is out-of-date and should be updated in the next release.

I've used it for four or five years.

We had some issues with the Exchange agent, but this was resolved with HP support.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Tech support varies a bit depending on who takes the call. Generally speaking, it’s at a professional level.

We previously used CA Arcserve.

The product is somewhat complex because of container object permission inheritance. Compared to a “normal” Windows software, it was a bit more complicated.

Implementation was done by a value added reseller (VAR) and their level of expertise was adequate.

In theory, the pricing structure is quite simple: just pick what you need. But the price tag might be a little on the high side.

We also evaluated Symantec Backup Exec.

Get a professional to do the initial configuration and, after that, you can continue on your own.

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.

Micro Focus Data Protector is used for data backups.

The dashboards in Micro Focus Data Protector are very good. They are similar to the dashboards in Veeam Backup & Replication. 

I have been using Micro Focus Data Protector for approximately 16 years.

Micro Focus Data Protector is highly stable.

I have found Micro Focus Data Protector to be scalable.

The Micro Focus Data Protector support is not as good as Veeam Backup & Replication's support.

I have used Veritas and Veeam Backup & Replication.

The solution is easy to implement.

They have two types of licensing, one is for storage capacity and the other is client licensing. The capacity licensing here is a bit expensive.

If Micro Focus Data Protector has a universal license for every aspect of the operation, there would be no limit to us. For example, they have a different license for Exchange, Oracle, and SQL. You have to have an online license, it can be an expensive adventure.

I rate Micro Focus Data Protector an eight out of ten.

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.