Symantec revs-up NetBackup 7.5, Backup Exec

BANGALORE, INDIA: Symantec Corp. announced a new approach for modernizing back-up and recovery.

“Today, Symantec unveils a radical new plan to modernize data protection that will drive out 80 per cent of the operating costs associated with back-up over the next five years,” said Deepak Mohan, senior vice president, Symantec Information Management Group.  “Symantec is announcing a new set of solutions that address the problems in back-up — from the most complex of enterprise data centres requiring a true tiered-recovery strategy to the smallest business that needs the confidence that they can easily recover their data.”

Key components to Symantec’s unique approach to data protection are the NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012.

Symantec’s strategy focuses on the following areas:

Change the Operating Model of Back-up: Symantec’s strategy is to eliminate 80 per cent of the operating cost of back-up by delivering an integrated platform that replaces multiple solutions typically used in back-up today. 

Break the Back-up Window: Faster back-up with NetBackup 7.5, compared to traditional approaches, means organizations can complete full back-ups at the speed of incremental back-ups without sacrificing recoverability to meet critical service levels.

Fight Infinite Retention: New back-up search capabilities in NetBackup give IT the ability to separate out what is relevant to legal or compliance investigations while keeping the rest of the back-up infrastructure running on a more typical 30-60-90 day back-up cycle. Infinite retention is infinite waste for IT and infinite risk for legal.

Unify Snapshots and Back-up: Unifying snapshots and back-up with NetBackup gives organizations the speed of snapshots with the recoverability of back-up.

Stop Putting Tapes on Trucks: With the help of Symantec NetBackup technology, organizations can modernize disaster recovery strategies and stop the practice of shipping tapes by truck.

Symantec NetBackup Auto Image Replication (AIR) allows customers to eliminate volumes of physical assets and prioritize files that can be sent over the network, while significantly reducing the chance for human error.

Unite Virtual and Physical Back-ups: Reduce operating costs around virtualization with patent pending Symantec V-Ray technology that enables organizations to have deeper visibility into VMware and Hyper-V machines for virtual back-ups with a single product.

Integrated in NetBackup and Backup Exec, V-Ray delivers load balanced virtual machine backups to eliminate backup storms, improve virtual machine performance and reduce storage by deduplicating data everywhere, whether it is on VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers.

One Product for Any Recovery:  Symantec provides one solution for all back-ups whether they are based on tape, disk, or in physical or virtual environments.

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Customers can recover any application or system to a virtual machine whether they have the hardware or not. Physical to virtual recovery is now included for free in Backup Exec, simplifying disaster recovery by automatically creating a virtual machine when recovery is needed.

New back-up to virtual (B2V) technology is also available to accelerate the migration from physical to virtual servers as part of the back-up process.

Easy Backup: Symantec introduces Backup Exec Small Business Edition ensuring smaller companies can set-up proper data protection in less than 10 minutes and in three simple steps. 

Symantec also released the results of its latest survey where it surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals worldwide on back-up practices and ability to recover information in the event of a disaster.

The findings reveal that traditional approaches to back-up are broken and a new approach is vitally needed:

Forty nine per cent of respondents can not meet service level agreements (SLAs) due to too much data.

Seventy two per cent of respondents would switch back-up product if speed doubled.

Twenty eight per cent say they have too many back-up tools.

Organizations average four back-up solutions to protect physical systems, and three for virtual.

Forty two per cent of respondents believe that their virtualization back-up is not adequately or perfectly working.

More than a third (36 per cent) of respondents would not bet their paychecks that 100 per cent of backed-up data could be recovered.

According to Symantec’s 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, SMBs are not making disaster preparedness a priority until they experience a disaster or data loss. Half of the respondents do not have a plan in place and 41 per cent said that it never occurred to them to put together a disaster recovery plan.

The survey data reveals that the cost of not being prepared is high, putting SMBs at risk of going out of business.