Veritas Intros NetBackup 8.2 As Part Of New Fully Integrated Enterprise Data Services Platform

Veritas this week expanded its flagship NetBackup data protection software with new capabilities for cloud and virtualized environments, and made the software the foundation of its new Enterprise Data Services Platform.

Veritas' new Enterprise Data Services Platform integrates the company's NetBackup 8.2 with its InfoScale automation and orchestration technology and the data analytics capabilities of its new Information Studio and Aptare technologies.

Veritas has been working on integrating its technology for over a year to build a single platform, said Jyothi Swaroop, vice president of product and solutions marketing for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor.

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"We wanted to build a platform which can easily add services, whether they've been around for some time or to be unveiled in the future," Swaroop told CRN.

Businesses are dealing with massive growth of data even as cybersecurity and ransomware attacks grow more sophisticated and regulatory environments become more complicated, Swaroop said.

"We decided to bring all our capabilities together to take advantage of the metadata generated by the components," he said.

The Enterprise Data Services Platform is based on three core technology focuses, all of which now work together to protect customers' environments, Swaroop said.

The first is data protection as provided by NetBackup, which Swaroop said is still the primary data protection software used by enterprises worldwide.

The latest version, NetBackup 8.2, now supports a fully agentless architecture for VMware-based environments, as well as full support for RedHat KVM and OpenStack environments, and is the first backup and recovery offering certified for Docker and Kubernetes containers, he said.

For cloud-focused clients, NetBackup 8.2 supports Amazon Web Services' Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive capabilities. It now backs up data to the cloud at twice the speed it did in the past, and provides automated disaster recovery to and in the cloud. It also provides cloud-native application-consistent data protection for Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and MongoDB databases, Swaroop said.  

NetBackup 8.2 also includes new native snapshot technologies for backup, orchestration, cataloging, and replication, and provides self-service plugins for ServiceNow and VMware vRealize, he said.

"NetBackup supports over 500 data sources, including everything from the 1980s until what's happening now," he said. "We support over 150 storage providers and over 60 cloud providers. We've expanded NetBackup to any major and minor data source you want to protect."

The second core technology focus is information availability, which is provided by Veritas InfoScale, formerly known as Veritas Storage Foundation.

InfoScale was enhanced with the ability to cluster AWS availability zones for migrated mission-critical applications, Swaroop said. It now supports Chef and Ansible platforms as well as Ipv6, and has several new security enhancements. It also includes new capabilities for Nutanix, Dell EMC ScaleIO, and NVMe-based storage.

"InfoScale keeps the business running 24x7," he said. "In the Enterprise Data Services Platform, it extends availability to the cloud so any tier-one application like Oracle can shift to the cloud with full resiliency and high availability."

The third core technology is insights, and consists of two Veritas offerings, Swaroop said.

The first is Information Studio, a new offering that crawls the entire data infrastructure, both on-premises and in the cloud, to provide a complete global view of where data is located, what's shared, what's PII (personally identifiable information, and the cost of keeping that data.

"It also manages the deletion of data," he said. "That last capability is very important for GDPR and other regulatory environments where citizens have the right to have data deleted. But a lot of companies don't know where the data is stored."  

The second is Aptare, which Veritas acquired earlier this year. "Aptare has plug-ins to all backup, storage, and cloud vendors," he said. "It gets to the IT level to show how many backup jobs there are, where the data is being backed up to, the cost of the backups, and comparison of costs to other vendors or other media. It also eases repatriation from the cloud."

The Enterprise Data Services Platform, while it may superficially look like a rebranding of Veritas' capabilities, is actually a significant move by the vendor to bring its technologies together in an integrated way, said Angelo Sciascia, senior vice president at NetX Information Systems, a Brooklyn, NY-based solution provider and Veritas channel partner and number 483 on CRN's 2019 Solution Provider 500 list.

Veritas has had multiple great technologies, but the company has traditionally taken a siloed approach to them, Sciascia told CRN.

"But with the introduction of Information Studio and the acquisition of Aptare, which was the best move Veritas did in a long time, it is now better able to take advantage of NetBackup and its other technologies and manage all of a customer's data in a single Veritas portfolio," he said.  

That data management capability extends beyond the Veritas environment to include data from competitors such as Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Sciascia said.

"There has never been a real good way to get a holistic view of all that backup data before," he said. "And now Veritas throws in primary storage as part of a way to get analytics on all a customer's data. For instance, Aptare gives analytics around the infrastructure, the physical aspects of where data is sitting and how efficient is its stored. Then Information Studio takes the information discovered by Aptare to provide actionable events based on the value of the data."

Sciascia said he likes to think his conversations with Veritas helped influence the vendor's move to integrated its technologies into the Enterprise Data Services Platform.  

"I was no Veritas fanboy," he said. "But I know how difficult it is to get a holistic view of all the data. Veritas is going to the core, and needs to layer on new technologies to make it happen."

Swaroop said the Enterprise Data Services Platform, like all Veritas products, is primarily channel-driven, with about 80 percent of sales coming from indirect channel partners.