Bocada Announces Data Protection Management For SMBs

Bocada Prism Lite

Bocada on Tuesday announced Prism Lite, a less expensive version of its Bocada Prism data protection reporting and troubleshooting tool that lets companies determine the overall health of their data protection environments.

According to Bocada, the Prism tool can help improve a company's backup "health" by pinpointing and diagnosing trouble spots, evaluate current policies to see if they support business goals such as being able to meet Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives and deliver on SLAs.

Additionally, according to the company, using DPSM can reduce capital costs for backup, and reduce the risk or cost of backup-related downtime. Bocada provides data protection management software, based on its Data Protection Service Management (DPSM) process, a workflow analysis that the company developed.

"Data protection activities can include everything from traditional backups to replication, backup deduplication in-application backup 'dumps' and storage system snapshots, all data backups intended for the purpose of recovery," according to Nancy Hurley, CEO of Bocada. "These days, companies have to not only do backups, but be able to confirm and prove they were done, including for compliance."

George Crump, analyst at Storage Switzerland, has stated, "...data protection for many organizations is a patchwork of unrelated tasks all trying to protect different parts of the data center with little communication between each other, and little relationship to the service level commitments of the organization... This multitude of overlapping data protection efforts often leads to redundant purchases of data protection hardware and software and additional processes for the administrators to monitor."

Bocada Prism Lite

"Right now, most organizations need to have the visibility to know that backups have been completed and that data is recoverable, but also see how you're using resources," said Hurley. "If you're over-protecting, you're spending too much, for example, and to make sure that your policies align with your priorities, like making sure that critical data is backed up frequently, and that you are using your storage capacity effectively. Solutions like this also help reduce the administrative tasks, by automating tasks otherwise done manually or requiring admins to write scripts. For SMBs, where a single person may be managing all the backup, the more you can automate in data capture and reporting, the more time they can save."

According to Bocada, "Prism Lite provides the ability to determine the health of the overall data protection environment, troubleshoot problem areas and trend use over time for auditing, capacity planning and policy management purposes."

Prism Lite is intended for companies, or departments within companies, whose data protection environments consist of 500 or fewer managed clients -- server applications that require being backed up, like instances of Microsoft Exchange or SQL.

Bocada claims that "Prism Lite is functionally equivalent to traditional heterogeneous backup reporting solutions like ApTare or Symantec Operation Center (formerly known as Veritas Backup Reporter, VBR), but those cost about what our full enterprise service management version of Prism costs."

The full version of Prism, intended for enterprises looking for service management for data protection, also includes advanced problem management, SLA Compliance Management and Analysis, impact analysis, built-in workflow, and Policy Management and Change Analysis.

Bocada sells Prism via channels; MSRP for Prism Lite is roughly $10,000 for Tier 1 (up to 100 managed clients), $20,000 for Tier 2 (up to 250 clients), $30,000 for Tier 3 (up to 500 managed clients). The full enterprise version of Bocada Prism is sold on a per unit basis at a list price of $150 a unit.