CIOIN

Symantec unveiled new versions of its flagship NetBackup enterprise-class and Backup Exec midrange backup applications -- Backup Exec 2012 and NetBackup v7.5.

Vijay Mhaskar, Vice President, Information Management Group said that worldwide backup teams are frustrated with missed backup windows and non-integrated solutions for physical and virtual backups, deduplication and snapshots.  Currently organizations face a situation where recovery, the end goal of why backups exist, is complex and unnecessarily expensive.  

“Our survey of 1,425 organizations worldwide shows that only 28 percent of the companies are completely confident that 100 percent of the backed-up data can be recovered,” says Mhaskar “Virtualization backup ranks 2nd lowest of successful IT initiatives as the complexity demands more agile systems.”

The NetBackup v7.5 for the larger enterprises includes features like the integration of incremental backups and deduplication to reduce I/O bandwidth and reduce the time needed for backups, as well as to offer eDiscovery without having to first replicate data into a separate repository.

“Our tests on the new system versus existing methods pf backup show that a 61GB file being backed up from US to china which earlier took about 4 hours 18 minutes 7 seconds now takes only 1 minute 33 seconds,” says Mhaskar.

Symantec also announced an expanded partnership with NetApp to integrate with NetBackup Replication Director, enabling customers to unify Snapshot and backup management, and remove the cost and risk associated with multiple backup and recovery tools

The V-Ray Edition of NetBackup v7.5 can back up data on virtual machines running either VMware or Microsoft's HyperV. Additionally, backup administrators can add physical machines to V-Ray's backup capability policy and manage both environments through a single console view.

The update adds a new feature called Virtual Machine Intelligent Policy (VIP) to NetBackup v7.5 , that can automatically detect and back up new, moved, or cloned virtual machines, using deduplication to reduce the amount of data stored. Again, physical machines can be added to the virtual machine backups.

According to Symantec, many businesses face the problem of cost exposure resulting from over retention of backup tapes.  NetBackup Search identifies what information to archive and what to delete based on relevance to legal discovery or compliance cases.

Symantec said it also added bare metal backups and restore disaster recovery capabilities into Backup Exec 2012, which allow a failed system to be recovered to a physical server, or to a Hyper-V or VMware machine. The new disaster recovery features also allow entire virtual machines, single files, Active Directory objects, Exchange Emails, or SharePoint Documents from any single-pass physical, VMware or Hyper-V backup to be recovered.

The NetBackup Accelerator feature works by backing up only incremental file changes; those incremental file changes are then also deduplicated to further reduce network traffic. When Accelerator is used to recover data, it has an index that allows it to quickly restore single documents or files.

“The system keeps track of the files that have changed and the blocks that have changed within those files. So when a backup is done, the system knows what blocks to back up and where they are," said Mhaskar.

As of now the licensing policy stands on a SaaS model or can be bought on the capacitive licensing model. The company expects the products to be available by the spring of 2012.

 “Companies can pay for the amount of data they decide to store with us or pay on a per machine license policy,” Mhaskar clarified.