Veritas Revs NetBackup

The enhancements to the company's flagship network backup application come mainly from Veritas' January acquisition of The Kernel Group, an Austin, Texas-based developer of disaster-recovery software. Solution providers can now offer Kernel's Bare Metal Restore, an application that quickly brings a server back to life, as an option to NetBackup 4.5, said Mike Adams, product marketing manager for NetBackup at Veritas.

Bare Metal Restore works across multiple platforms including Windows, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX to automatically track all information related to the file system, such as network information, user preferences, drivers and settings during backups. This cuts recovery time to between 20 minutes and an hour for a typical Solaris environment, company executives said.

The tight integration of disaster-recovery features in a storage management application is important, said Paul Mayer, product manager of data protection at solution provider Datalink, Minneapolis. "When you need [disaster recovery, you want it tightly coupled," he said. "Also, you want the disaster-recovery software in synch with the rest of the application so you can make sure the revisions are up to date."

Another new feature is the capability to take point-in-time data captured by such applications as EMC's TimeFinder, Hitachi Data Systems' Shadow Image and Hewlett-Packard's Business Copy and send it to tape, Adams said.

Veritas also introduced NetBackup Vault, which creates duplicate copies of tapes during backups, and an enhanced version of NetBackup Storage Migrator, which allows infrequently used data to be automatically migrated to low-cost storage media.

Pricing for the DataCenter edition is $5,000 for Windows and $10,000 for Unix. The BusinesServer edition is $1,995 for Windows and $3,995 for Unix.