Disappointing Review.
It's not very often I'm provoked into making a criticism of a respected publication, however there's nothing like being grumpy!
I've published a number of posts about baselines, trending and performance analysis and I've been quick to remark when published examples don't really match real world, so I was surprised to read a review of compressed backup software for SQL Server and the conclusions drawn in a leading publication.
I'm a keen user of such a product, which wasn't part of the review, and although I've only used the one, but at several client sites, I suspect that the choice of the Quest or Redgate product is more a personal one, however if one is to write a review of such a product then it would make sense to provide accurate comparisions and test in an enterprise environment.
From the description of the test "server" I'd figure the tests were carried out on a laptop with an external drive. A "large", 540Gb, database was used to be fair but because the database was "so large" the tester could not actually perform a native backup or restore as there wasn't sufficient disk space, only a single TB disk was availble, so estimated times were published as the base to compare against. Hmmm - pick a number, add 5, divide by the number you first thought of, add 15 seconds to make it look good - you get my feeling on this.
A single core 1.8Ghz processor also doesn't really cut the mustard either.
Now I may be wrong but I can't really think that the average enterprise user of Lite Speed or Redgate SQL Backup will be using a low spec single processor with two sata drives - but feel free to comment if indeed your production databases do run on such a system.
So my point is that the average Production Server is likely to have multiple cores and at least half way decent scsi/fc storage, the product I use can be configured to use threads, buffers and compression ratio's - I spent some time testing which combination of these settings gave me the best compression vs time performance, and I didn't even touch the use of multiple backup files, all the types of things you'd investigate if you were looking to back up "large" databases or you want really fast backups and restores. And if you were going to write a review aimed at Database Professionals who'd be looking into deployment in the enterprise.
Such is the same with performance testing or trending, you must have a valid baseline and you must have a test environment which at least gets somewhere near to the actual production environment you intend to deploy to.
My personal view is such reviews do not add any value and also give a misguided view of the technology and products, I obviously also disagree with the recommendations of the review, but that's another matter.