Symantec’s Unified Method Covers Backup Bases


Symantec  today released a major upgrade to its
NetBackup data-protection platform and pledged to unify its data protection,
storage management and archiving platforms under one umbrella.


Unveiled at the Symantec Vision 2007 show in Las Vegas today, NetBackup 6.5
boasts the unified management of all backup technologies in a datacenter and
is first fresh leg of Symantec’s new Storage United vision.


Matt Kixmoeller, senior director of product management for the datacenter
management group at Symantec, said NetBackup 6.5 bridges the gap between
tape-based protection and disk storage.


Whereas in the past, customers either had tape or disk-based storage, backup
environments of today span tape, virtual tape libraries, continuous data
protection (CDP), snapshots and replication. This can be a nightmare to
manage, which is why Symantec crafted NetBackup 6.5 to manage all forms of
backup. The idea is to take the complexity out of data protection.


“What that means is a single platform that can manage all of these
protection solutions, that can allow customers to use tape and gives them
the flexibility to use different tools for replication and snapshot and
CDP,” Kixmoeller said.


NetBackup 6.5 isn’t just one big integration scheme, either.

The platform boasts new features, including the ability to manage data
snapshots from all of the major array vendors, including EMC , IBM , HDS, Network Appliance  and Sun ; CDP, from Symantec’s purchase
of Revivio; and de-duplication, which allows for better storage utilization.


Other new features include a flexible disk option, which allows users to
back up over a storage area network (SAN) down into a shared pool of disks
that is centrally managed, as well as the ability to use snapshots to store the
massive quantities of data created by VMware virtual machines.


Kixmoeller acknowledged that while vendors such as EMC and IBM may offer CDP
or de-duplication pieces, they offer them as isolated products. Symantec
believes NetBackup 6.5 is a next-generation backup offering that covers all
of the bases.


To wit, integrating all of the data protection tools under NetBackup
symbolizes the new Storage United strategy Symantec created to boost the
poor storage utilization rates administrators are dealing with in
datacenters.


Overwhelmed by the disparate technologies and complex nature of their
platforms, customers tend to separate storage into different pools or
islands, which leads to poor utilization. Combine this inefficiency with the
unfettered growth of all types of data with the duplicate data glut and that
adds up to one expensive headache.


Storage United is geared to ease these pains with a single layer of storage
management software that bridges the gap between the storage administrators
who provide the storage and the business managers who order it.


Kixmoeller said this means supporting “virtually anything,” including any
server operating system and storage hardware. So if a customer has Linux,
Solaris and Windows in their network, along with storage from EMC, Network
Appliance and Sun, Symantec can manage the products.


“We know that customers are not going to be able to buy everything from one
vendor,” Kixmoeller said.


The strategy finds Symantec discarding a ghost of its past; the storage
assets sold as point products when they were under the Veritas mantle.

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