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Gartner mages: And the Enterprise Archiving Magic Quadrant top spot goes to...

HP. Yes, really

There's a new magic quadrant out. Gartner has awarded top position in enterprise archiving to – wait for it – HP, with Symantec second. Next up are three firms few have heard and at sixth spot is CommVault, rounding out the leaders' box.

Why?

The gnomes at Gartner say: "Enterprise information archiving offers IT managers in organisations solutions for compliance and e-discovery, while reducing primary storage costs." The magic quadrant (MQ) locates suppliers in four boxes: leaders, challengers, niche players and "visionaries".

Gartner_Enterprise Archiving_MQ

The boxes occupy a 2D space defined by Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision axes.

Gartner says "HP ... provides the HP Consolidated Archive (HPCA) for on-premises archiving, and HP Digital Safe for the cloud."

It scored highly because:

  • HP is used in very large-scale environments and in many of the most stringent enterprise compliance and governance use cases.
  • HP has strong support for multiple geographies, with data centres around the globe.
  • HP DSmail is viewed favourably for ease of use by clients for end-user access to archived data, including email, files, IM and other content.

It has also has downsides such as a complex and less-than-intuitive admin interface, less than pefect customer support and a sometimes lengthy deployment.

Why did CommVault not come top of the heap? Gartner's gurus thought:

  • CommVault archiving is mainly used for files. Email archiving is not used as much as file archiving, and the vendor's sales team sometimes struggles to get the compliance message across for communications data archiving.
  • Simpana licensing can be confusing, especially in cases where both backup and archiving are purchased.
  • The Simpana console is complex and, in some cases, overbuilt, as there are many different ways to do the same task, which can be confusing.

We've just extracted snapshots of the report's contents. It is well worth reading in its entirety to get a more balanced view.

Get the Gartner Enterprise Archiving MQ report here. ®

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