As I.T. systems become more complicated, it becomes harder to manage, back up, and restore data if a problem occurs. Many large businesses have multiple backup and recovery products but no way to share data among them. And even if a business can manage its systems with one product, generating useful reports can require a lot of manual processes.

Bocada Inc. is trying to deal with that problem this week when it unveils BackupReport Suite 2.0, which will add support for IBM's Tivoli TSM systems-management framework to the roster of management products with which it works. BackupReport customers already can view information from Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, Legato Systems, Microsoft, and Veritas Software systems from a single console and create reports on system and network performance. The upgrade also will let customers evaluate the utilization and performance of storage components to more quickly discover bottlenecks and damaged infrastructure.

Reader's Digest sees back-up efficiencies, Ladd says.

Reader's Digest Association Inc. is a current BackupReport customer and doesn't plan to upgrade until 2004. But Adam Ladd, desktop technology analyst at Reader's Digest, is pleased that the vendor keeps enhancing the product. Reader's Digest runs Veritas NetBackup products at corporate headquarters in the United States but uses Tivoli's TSM framework in its other major data centers worldwide.

BackupReport lets Reader's Digest prepare reports, which used to take two hours, in a second. Systems backups that used to be performed by a team of people now require only a small percentage of one person's workday. In addition, backups that could take as long as 28 hours now can be done overnight, and the company hasn't had to buy any new hardware even though its data is growing at around 20% a year.

At first, Ladd says, he argued with Reader's Digest's top management about the need for such software. But "with the efficiencies we get out of it, they love it," he says.

An industry analyst says Bocada is bringing new capabilities to the people in charge of backup and recovery. "It looks at the log report and tells you if jobs don't get backed up and finds out why and what percentage of the servers finished their backups," says Steve Kenniston at research firm Enterprise Storage Group. "It's service-level agreements for backup and recovery."