Channel Register

Original URL: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/06/12/symantec_vision_07_ceo_keynote/

Symantec back ups backup software

By Austin Modine in Las Vegas
Published Tuesday 12th June 2007 18:11 GMT

Vision 2007 Symantec fleshed out its storage software portfolio today, and wheeled in CEO John Thompson to big up the launch during his keynote at the Symantec Vision conference in Las Vegas.

Thompson pushed a new version of NetBackup to lead the charge in a new corporate initiative aimed at consolidating data protection, storage management and archiving platforms under a single software platform.

"Most IT organizations have no way of getting a global view of their storage management," he said. Symantec's newly dubbed Storage United initiative will deliver a solution, he pledged.

NetBackup 6.5 promises to unite tape, virtual tape libraries, disk backup, snapshots and replication across all major vendors. The new version also adds native disk-based backup, data de-duplication, further integration with virtual tape libraries, snapshot management, and granular recovery for critical applications and virtual machines. It will be generally available in August.

A new Flexible Disk Option enables users to perform high speed SAN backup to a disk pool shared by the entire backup environment.

The product's VTL integration was given more breadth, with a Virtual Tape Option that allows users to copy data directly from the VTL to tape, using a process controlled by NetBackup in a catalog-consistent manner. NetBackup's OpenStorage Option uses a Symantec API which allows backup appliances to integrate natively with NetBackup.

Symantec's Storage United push hopes to entice companies using multiple platforms of storage that are separated into different pools. Thompson said this inefficient storage combined with duplicate data stored on multiple machines leads to an industry storage utilization average of about 30 per cent.

After NetBackup 6.5's release, the Storage United war drums will continue to beat with updates to the company's storage management software in mid-summer and archiving software further down the line.

Symantec is pricing NetBackup 6.5 with both a capacity-based model and a traditional server-based option.

Server-side, users can chose between a standard client and an enterprise client. The standard includes physical tape options and bare-metal restore. The enterprise client includes NetBackup's snapshot feature and disk-based backup options.

Disk-side, users can go with an a la carte option and license individual features or bundled options with a per terabyte model. ®

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