Bocada Reports for Oracle Duty

Bocada Inc. is broadening its backup reporting capabilities to cover specific applications, beginning with Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN).

Bocada next week will announce the RMAN module for its Backup Report product, with similar modules in the works for Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Exchange and SQL Server, and for IBM Corp.'s (NYSE: IBM) DB2. Analysts expect competitors to follow closely with their own versions as backup reporting vendors try to extend their reach.

Bocada is among a handful of startups, also including Crosswalk Inc., Illuminator Software, ServerGraph Inc., Tek-Tools Inc., and WysDM Software Inc., trying to take advantage of reporting gaps in the dominant backup software applications.

Bocada's Backup Report gives customers automated reports about the success and failure rates of an enterprises backups. It currently supports the major backup products, such as Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) Net Backup and Backup Exec, EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Legato, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) OpenView, and Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA) ArcServe.

According to Bocada marketing VP Drake Pruitt, Bocada targeted databases and Exchange with its add-on modules because they’re among the applications customers most often back up to disk.“We have to give customers a comprehensive view beyond Net Backup or Legato,” Pruitt says. “We’re going to start pumping these modules out. Customers are using these specialized applications because they’re concerned with database failures.”

RMAN automates backup and recovery for Oracle databases. The latest version has new features that automate and manage backup to disk. Bocada’s RMAN module will incorporate information from the Oracle backups into its centralized reports.

Analysts say it's important for Bocada and its competitors to broaden their capabilities. Besides backup software, they need to extend support to servers, switches, and other network components. They also need to furnish more granular reporting.

“Next year, a significant discussion in this space will be around applications, service-level agreements, and recovery from disk,” says Brad O’Neill of Taneja Group.

He mentions Avamar Inc., Asigra Inc., EVault Inc., and LiveVault Corp. as products with good built-in reporting, but indicates there's room for improvement everywhere.The major backup players seem intent on improving their reporting capabilities as well. EMC is rebranding WysDM’s product as EMC Backup Advisor (see EMC Makes Legato 'Wyser'). Symantec, which acquired Net Backup and Backup Exec when it bought Veritas, also has a monitoring product called LiveState Recovery Manager, but it has not been integrated with Veritas’s backup applications.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch