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Introducing Bocada Prism: Transforming the way you view Data Protection Service Management
Bocada Prism is the first and only data protection service management solution purpose-built to intuitively drive users through the multi-phased Data Protection Service Management process. Bocada has leveraged years of customer experiences to create a workflow driven, intelligent analysis solution with built in SLA impact analysis, change tracking and trend analysis and a searchable knowledge base to ensure organizations can meet business goals and improve operational efficiencies.
Bocada Prism is the only solution on the market that is solely focused on enabling end-users and MSP’s to effectively deliver data protection services to either internal or external customers.
The key customer benefits are:
- Lower overall operational costs
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Increased recoverability and lower cost of downtime
- Better IT business alignment
- Significant process improvement
Prism has many competitive differentiators including:
- SLA Impact analysis
- Policy change impact analysis
- Enables annotation and knowledge transfer
- Completely agent-less solution
- Broadest heterogeneous support
Features
Transforming the way you view Data Protection Service Management
Bocada designed Prism as an intuitive, workflow driven, modular, web-based, application that is aimed at both internal IT departments and Managed Service Providers to more effectively deliver data protection services to internal and external customers.
Bocada Prism is built around four process-driven modules that walk the user through a series of steps that view, report and correct and understand the policies, actions and performance of the complete data protection environment. Customizable dashboards for each module allow IT and backup administrators to drill down in each module for specific actionable information about the health, problems, policies and SLAs of the data protection environment.
- Health Check Module
- Problem Management Module
- Policy Management Module
- SLA Management Module
- SLA Chargeback
Health Check Module
The DPSM process begins here with assessments that reveal the true effectiveness of the data protection environment. The Health Check Module gives IT and MSPs immediate visibility into recent and long-term operation of the environment with job trend analysis to determine inconsistencies in backup performance and opportunities for improvement. Customizable dashboards enable the environment to be viewed by geography, department, customer and other options while administrators have the ability to drill-down for problem diagnosis.
Problem Management Module
Unlike other applications that simply report backup problems, Bocada Prism provides users with the information to pinpoint, diagnose and help eliminate trouble spots and identify opportunities for improvement. This module also enables customers to quickly determine the impact of backup errors on SLAs and drill in on particular errors to reveal detailed backup activity messages and codes for further analysis and corrective action. The Problem Management Module annotates activity on clients or backups to keep track of all actions and remedies for knowledge transfer and proactively discovers unprotected (orphaned) assets.
Policy Management Module
This module automates the job of creating standardized best practices based on the DPSM model and the processes developed in previous phases enables streamlined operations, reduced TCO, increased IT business contribution, and increased overall customer satisfaction. Prism’s ability to automate the policy creation process also eliminates to and administrative overhead needed build and run scripts. The policy management module enables administrators to easily view information on numerous aspects of server and policy configuration, including schedules, storage, client details and job and capacity trends. A Change Analysis feature automatically tracks changes in policies and shows the impact of any policy changes on backup performance and SLAs.
SLA Management Module
The SLA phase of the DPSM process is one of the most critical for a business’s ability to meet its customer commitments, especially for MSPs. Bocada Prism’s SLA module enables users to easily track SLA performance and share results with internal or external customers via the web. Bocada Prism configures SLA profiles based on the needs of the business. Instead of simple reports indicating whether or not SLAs were achieved, Bocada Prism delivers proactive SLA impact reports, showing how SLAs will affected be by policy or infrastructure changes, and SLA trending reports, giving administrators different views of their SLAs by zones, applications, clients and more. The SLA metrics report is especially valuable to users, quickly showing which SLAs are being met, which are not and why, identifying exactly where the problem is within the data protection infrastructure.
Bocada Prism uses the SLA data to create price lists for internal and external customers based on backup activity or storage usage and automate the billing process. In addition to billing for external MSP customers, Bocada Prism creates charge-back reports for IT to send to internal business departments. Charge-back reports are a valuable business tool even when IT is not charging internal customers for backup and data protection as it exposes the costs of actually protecting the data to business units giving them a better understanding and appreciation of the DPSM process and aligns IT with business needs.
Bocada Prism FAQs
What market does Bocada Prism address?
Bocada Prism was purpose built to help customers move through the Data Protection Service Management model, a multi-phase set of best practices to ensure cost effective delivery of data protection services to customers. Bocada Prism is much more than a backup reporting solution, Bocada Prism is a service management application. Bocada has leveraged years of customer experiences to create a workflow driven, intelligent analysis solution with built in SLA impact analysis, change tracking and trend analysis and a searchable knowledge base to ensure organizations can meet business goals and improve operational efficiencies.
Who is the target customer?
As this is a solution focused on improving data protection service delivery, this is an ideal product for any managed service provider (MSP) , SaaS or Cloud services vendor offering backup and data protection services.
However, this is by all means a solution that can be targeted at the end user, specifically mid-large size enterprise organizations. Any IT organization that has adopted or plans to adopt ITSM initiatives, is concerned about delivering against SLAs or needs to do chargeback is an ideal candidate. Bocada Prism can be targeted at any vertical segment, however over the years we have found that organizations that are truly depend on data availability for business operations and are subject to compliance regulations are the best targets- this generally includes financial institutions, healthcare, energy, retail and bio/pharmaceutical organizations.
What are 5 top reasons customers will want to buy Bocada Prism?
Bocada Prism is the only solution on the market that is solely focused on enabling end-users and MSP’s to effectively deliver data protection services to either internal or external customers.
The key customer benefits are:
- Lower overall operational costs
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Increased recoverability and lower cost of downtime
- Better IT business alignment
- Significant process improvement
What are the key competitive differentiators?
Prism has many competitive differentiators, however these are the most significant, unmatched competitive differentiators (please see competitive matrix for more details).
- SLA Impact analysis
- Policy change impact analysis
- Enables annotation and knowledge transfer
- Completely agent-less solution
- Broadest heterogeneous support
What is the difference between Bocada Prism and Bocada Enterprise?
Bocada Prism is the next generation solution for the Data Protection Service Management market. Bocada Enterprise has been on the market for nine years and has a very substantial installed base. The next generation solution (Prism), leverages the same market leading scalable data collection engine and open database that is in Bocada Enterprise, however the new product has been improved upon based on our observations of how customers used our product. Prism has a built in workflow, intelligent SLA impact analysis, policy change analysis and a knowledge base data base. Unlike Bocada Enterprise, Prism has a completely web based front end and new APIs which better enable integration with third party solutions (such as trouble ticketing applications).
Does Bocada Prism replace Bocada Enterprise?
While we want all of our partners to lead with Bocada Prism, we do understand that many of our installed base customers are familiar with the current solution and have extensive databases and processes in place using Bocada Enterprise. Our current roadmap plan is to provide a full upgrade path for installed base customers’ mid-2010.
Is Bocada Prism considered an SRM solution?
No. Storage Resource Management (SRM) solutions are focused on providing discovery and capacity analysis for primary storage solutions (such as disk arrays and NAS filers). Prism is solely focused on evaluating the data protection environment-often referred to as secondary storage.
What backup and replication applications does Prism support?
Bocada Prism has the broadest heterogeneous support of any data protection management solution on the market. Applications supported include IBM TSM, Symantec NetBackup, Backup Exec, and Puredisk, EMC Networker and Avamar*, Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007, CA BrightStor, HP DataProtector, Sun Storagetek ACSLS, Commvault Galaxy*, Syncsort. In addition, Bocada offers a Generic Application plug-in (GAP) which enables centralized reporting on any backup or replication solution that can export a CSV file of log events.
*Specific plug-ins that have not gone through a full QA process are available for purchase but are not sold with maintenance and are not guaranteed same level of support. Please contact your channel managers for more information.
Is Prism truly an agent-less application?
Yes, Prism (and our long term product Bocada Enterprise) is a completely agentless solution. This means customers do not need to install anything on the backup or replication servers. There are many benefits to an agent-less solution including quick and easy deployment, exceptional scalability, easy updates and minimal change management requirements.
The competitors say they are agent-less as well, how is prism different?
Some of our competitors claim to be agent-less, however none are fully agentless. Much of their "advanced" functionality requires an agent be installed on the backup or replication server. Any claim of "real time" alerting and management requires an agent. By requiring agents, our competition is putting a bigger administrative and change management burden on the end user customer. Please see the competitive matrix for further detail, and refer to the white paper Download "The 5 Essential Advantages: Agentless Technology for Data Protection Management" for more information.
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