Opening The Vault: Veritas Unveils Tools For Archiving, Recovery

Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of Veritas' data management group, last week unveiled Enterprise Vault 6.0, the first major new release of the e-mail archiving application since Veritas, Mountain View, Calif., acquired its creator, KVS, last year. The product, due this summer, will include improved features for archiving and recovering Microsoft Exchange files and a function that lets service providers serve multiple customers with a single instance of the software.

Burton also discussed NetBackup 6.0, which will offer expanded data snapshot capabilities, including the ability to manage snapshots created by other vendors. This feature turns the software into what Burton called a universal recovery tool. NetBackup 6.0, also due this summer, offers the ability to do bare metal restores, which bring up a downed system even if the operating system crashes.

Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Systems Group, a Denver-based solution provider, said more and more previously separate functions are being consolidated into storage management technology. "We're seeing the consolidation of storage management software pulling in such disparate functions as archiving and e-mail management and putting them together in a common family," he said.

Steve Krauss, senior manager of the enterprise storage technology practice at Chantilly, Va.-based GTSI, said the new Veritas products come as customers seek ways to protect information while keeping it available. "We're seeing a convergence between data recovery and data retrieval," he said.

A future version of NetBackup, due early next year and code-named BigHorn, will back up data to a virtualized storage pool on a SAN and from there to tape, said Burton. Also expected next year is new technology that breaks files into small chunks with their own unique signatures, ensuring that only those chunks that have changed are backed up and cutting overall storage capacity needs, he said.

A future version of Enterprise Vault, also due next year, will orchestrate backups and archiving so data retention policies for archived data also apply to backups. This will ensure that a corporation that has deleted sensitive data from an archive does not find it lingering on old tapes.