Prism Upgrade Future For All Bocada Customers

Data protection specialist Bocada enhances its service management solution, Prism and is announcing a migration path for its Enterprise (BE) product to Prism. Targeted at backup service providers, MSPs (managed service providers) and SaaS (software-as-a-service) vendors as well as large enterprises, Prism R2 adds improved trending analysis and enhanced performance, and is called the only solution to support Bocada's  Data Protection Service Management (DPSM) model.

Bocada says trending reports are essential for determining if the operation is running as expected, and to highlight if there are changes that must be made in order to help meet backup windows or reduce costs by eliminating excess storage use. The performance improvements for rendering reports on very large data sets make this version of Prism very attractive to large enterprise organizations, as well as service providers.

Prism R2 adds five new trending reports to the Health Check and Problem Management areas. Backup Trends allows users to view the amount of data being backed up during a given time period, which can be used for policy management, load balancing and storage planning. Backup Duration Trends enables users to compare their static backup window with backup duration trends. Media Usage Trends allows users to analyze the impact of backup trends on their media volumes over time which can be used to help load balance media resources. Occupancy Trends shows how overall storage changes over time, enabling users to predict future storage needs and measure the impact of changes to backup policy. And Error Trends enables backup administrators to see error count trending, to help  identify chronic problems and identify which error types are the biggest offenders.
 
Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, says with the R2 release, Bocada continues to differentiate itself from other solutions in this space. Unlike reporting functions within backup applications that are specific to that application, Bocada can collect, aggregate and enable analysis for multiple backup applications. "Bocada is differentiated because it's workflow driven. It provides a staged approach to understanding and analyzing the data protection environment."

She says most organizations manage multiple backup applications. "Integrated solutions create a siloed approach to monitoring and management ... there's no way to aggregate the data and look at the environment as a whole. Standalone solutions take an independent approach, and, importantly, provide a consolidated view of backup environment operations."

The migration packages for existing customers of Bocada Enterprise, an agentless, scalable data collection engine and open database, includes new Prism licenses and professional services providing migration assessment, validation, installation and hands on training training. The three packages are based on the size of a customer's existing BE installation and the extent of custom reports that need to be transferred.Each of the three packages is delivered in several phases: phase 1 is a migration requirements review; phase 2 verifies the migration with migration test, and includes training on new data presentation methods and workflow difference between the two products; and phase 3 is the migration, verifying the installation runs in the customer's production environment, and includes hands-on training for knowledge transfer purposes, as well as a follow-up to ensure a successful migration process.

Prism supports a wide range of backup applications, including IBM TSM, Symantec NetBackup, BackupExec, PureDisk, EMC Networker, Avamar, HP DataProtector, CA BrightStor, Commvault Galaxy, Syncsort, and Microsoft DPM 2010.