EMC: down, slow and virtually beaten

By admin | June 10, 2009 | 1 Comment 

admin

Pity poor EMC. It never rains but it pours! First, IDC releases its quarterly Storage Software Report, showing that Symantec was the only company to grow during Q109, narrowing EMC’s market share lead in Overall Storage Software. IDC also shows that Symantec extended its market share lead over EMC in Storage Infrastructure Software.

Then we see a new report from The Tolly Group showing that Symantec solutions reduce Exchange backup time by more than 4,000% over EMC NetWorker! It also shows that Symantec can recover a 200MB mailbox up to 13x faster than EMC NetWorker. And, using Granular Recovery Technology (GRT), Symantec next-generation data protection solutions were able to recover individual email messages up to 220x faster than EMC NetWorker.

Let me say right now that Symantec commissioned and paid for the Tolly Group study, but that doesn’t make the results any less valid. Right now, I’ll bet that the UK’s Conservative Party is commissioning its own research into voting intentions in the next election and finding out exactly what the rest of the world already knows. It’s always important to know who is behind any research, then let the integrity of the researcher inform your view. Details of the research methodology are given below for the clinically minded.

Tolly goes on to demonstrate the performance advantage of Symantec Backup Exec and Veritas NetBackup over EMC NetWorker in VMware environments. Results of performance testing show that Symantec solutions reduce the time required to backup virtual environments by up to 350% over EMC NetWorker by performing file- and folder-level backups in a single pass.

Furthermore, Symantec solutions were able to perform full image-level backups of virtual environments twice as fast as EMC NetWorker. And Symantec solutions enable recovery of a 1GB file from the virtual environments up to 14.2 times faster than EMC NetWorker from a full image backup and 3.3 times faster from a file- and folder-level backup.

Methinks it’ll take more than buying systems management company Configuresoft to get EMC out of this particular fix. Back to the drawing board.

Research methodology:

The tests were performed on separate clusters of like servers. Special efforts were made to ensure that the cluster environments consisting of six test servers, connected to a 4GB Fibre Channel SAN with a Fibre Channel Array and Tape Drive, were identical in configuration and performance from a hardware and application software perspective. Performance tests were done prior to loading the backup software (Symantec or the competitors) to ensure that hardware or other applications were not a factor in the testing.

The Tolly Group notified and extended an invitation to EMC and CommVault to participate in the testing. EMC did not respond to the invitation, CommVault declined to participate.

Peter Rae

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One Response to “EMC: down, slow and virtually beaten”

  1. Mustafa Ozcakir on December 11th, 2009

    This information is hard to believe. I have similar test results and in these test results the information above is quite different. an untuned Netbackap Server and untuned Networker storage node is used for the test and Networker had better results. claiming triple performance difference over a competitor is not realistic.

    (this is my personal option)

    Mustafa

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