Symantec Revives 'Veritas' For New Unified Storage

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Symantec is reintroducing the Veritas brand with a new release of its NetBackup application, which for the first time unifies Symantec and third-party functions in one platform.

Veritas NetBackup 6.5, unveiled Tuesday at the Symantec Vision conference in Las Vegas, combines tape and disk backup, virtual tape libraries (VTLs), data de-duplication, continuous data protection (CDP), data snapshots and replication under a single licensing and pricing system, with an aim toward enabling storage to be delivered as a service.

Symantec is currently referring to some of its products as "Veritas NetBackup" and "Veritas PureDisk," said Marty Ward, director of product marketing for NetBackup. "The Veritas name still has a lot of recognition," he said. "You'll be seeing it a lot more."

Under Symantec's Storage United strategy, the company over the next 18 months plans to bring its data protection, storage management and data archiving technology under a unified platform, starting this week with data protection, Ward said.

The typical business customer uses an array of applications, and each has different data protection requirements, with data recovery objectives ranging from those that must be back up in seconds after a failure to those that can get buy without immediate recovery, Ward said. However, the typical business has data replication or snapshots for high-speed recovery and tape backup for archiving, with new technologies like virtual tape libraries, data de-duplication and continuous data protection filling the gap between the two, he said.

Veritas NetBackup 6.5 brings replication, de-dupe and CDP together and integrates with any vendor's VTL or tape backup device, as well as with a wide range of third-party applications, Ward said.

It's a brilliant move for Symantec to bring many of those capabilities together, said Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Systems Group, a Denver-based solution provider.

"Symantec has a lot of neat stuff," Teter said. "Bare metal restore, de-dupe, encryption. Now there's nothing they can't do. Point solutions from other vendors have been chinking Symantec's armor. But by integrating all these different technologies, it's creating a very powerful enterprise package."

The integration comes after Symantec made a spate of acquisitions to bring in new technology, such as bare metal restore, according to Teter.

"NetBackup is one of their crown jewels," he said. "Now they're doing so much with it."

The first big addition to the application is an Enterprise Client for heterogeneous snapshot management and CDP, which Ward said greatly enhances NetBackup's legacy disk-based and tape-based backup capabilities.

Though NetBackup previously had a snapshot client, the new Enterprise Client works with Symantec and third-party snapshot tools, Ward said. It also includes a new SAN Client, which is a thin, lightweight client that allows all backups and recoveries to be done over the storage network rather than over a LAN. In the next couple of months, Symantec also plans to integrate a new version of its CDP software, which allows recovery points to be created at any time.

Next: More on the new NetBackup

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