Symantec Delivering Remote Office Backup Software

Symantec planned next week to unveil software to manage remote office data backup and recovery, which includes encryption of the data as it is replicated locally or to a central data center or off-site disaster recovery center.

The new Veritas NetBackup 6.0 PureDisk Remote Office Edition, based on technology acquired when the Cupertino, Calif.-based company acquired Belgium-based Data Center Technologies last year, encrypts backups in transit and when it is stored on disk, said Mike Adams, group manager for NetBackup product marketing.

PureDisk is aimed at centralizing the data from multiple remote offices to a company's central data center in order to manage that data from a single location, Adams said. "The problem with remote offices is that companies are not able to centralize their backup policies and typically have non-IT people handling tape," he said.

PureDisk allows data from a remote office to be replicated to a storage device at the central data center over a WAN, Adams said. The software can also replicate date from multiple servers to a single server in a remote office, with that single server's data then replicated to the central data center, he said. From the data center, it can then be replicated to a remote disaster recovery site and to a tape library for archiving.

Along with replication, PureDisk also provides single-instance storage, which means that duplicate files are eliminated during the replication process in order to decrease the amount of storage needed for the replications, Adams said.

In addition to the data, PureDisk also captures the metadata of replicated files in order to let users search for stored files according to such attributes as file name and creation date.

The software also secures the data by encrypting it during the replication process and when it is on disk using 256-bit Blowfish encryption. It also includes integrated encryption key management, Adams said.

PureDisk can scale to allow thousands of remote offices replicate to a central data center, and works with customer backup infrastructures regardless of which backup application is used, Adams said.

PureDisk is Symantec's first software to use the data replication technology from DCT, but not the last, Adams said. "We have other disk-to-disk backup software," he said. "But we wanted to get this out ASAP. By the first half of next year, we will integrate it into all our backup software."

PureDisk is expected to ship next week. It will initially be an add-on to give remote office data protection to NetBackup or other third-party backup software, with a fully-integrated NetBackup version expected in the near future. It is being offered to solution providers, service providers, and OEMs as a stand-alone software offering. However, said Adams, VARs will be able to integrate it with standard Intel-based or AMD-based servers for use as a remote office data protection appliance.