Symantec Bolsters Backup

Symantec kicked off its annual Vision conference in Las Vegas today with an overhaul of its NetBackup product and a long-term plan to tie together data protection, archiving, and storage management. (See Symantec Unveils NetBackup 6.5 and Symantec Launches Storage United.)

NetBackup 6.5 is being positioned by Symantec as a way to ease the management strain on CIOs and IT manager, thanks to a revamped pricing model and a slew of enhancements. (See Symantec Enhances PureDisk and Overdue Backup for Backup.)

The software, which will be available in the third quarter, offers a raft of upgrades around disk-based backup, virtualization, de-duplication, and VTLs, according to Matt Kixmoeller, Symantec's senior director of product management. "We're really evolving NetBackup to handle next-generation [data] protection."

In addition to a CDP feature built on technology from Symantec's Revivio acquisition, Symantec is also adding a virtual tape option to NetBackup, which enables VTLs to backup directly to tape. (See Symantec Dips Into De-Dupe and Symantec Swallows Revivio.) Previously, data was exchanged via NetBackup, slowing down the backup process.

Other enhancements include the introduction of native data de-duplication, bundling Symantec's previously standalone PureDisk software into NetBackup. The idea here is that users can ensure data is only stored once across their entire IT infrastructure.One user keen to try out this feature is Phil Rand, senior systems analyst at Seattle Pacific University, which currently uses NetBackup 6.0 to handle a total of 60 Tbytes of data. "I am very interested in that. Presumably, it would reduce the amount of bandwidth needed."

Symantec is also touting native disk backup capabilities, which it claims will enable data pooling over a SAN to a larger pool of shared disk, as well a number of virtualization enhancements.

At the heart of the virtualization upgrades is a feature called VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB). "This lets you snapshot a VM and mount it on the backup server," says Kixmoeller, explaining that this reduces the backup overhead by taking the processing burden off the virtual server.

IDC analyst Laura DuBois thinks this is a step in the right direction for Symantec. "VCB integration is huge," she says, explaining that the other backup alternative is the cumbersome installation of an agent on each virtual machine. "To offload all that processing to a proxy server will make backup of virtual machines much more viable."

Another new feature is the ability to restore individual virtual files, as opposed to previous NetBackup scenario, where users had to restore entire virtual machines to get hold of a single file.Symantec has also overhauled its NetBackup licensing model, which currently consists of more than 30 different licenses based on the number of clients, agents, and software options deployed. The vendor has now boiled this down into three separate licenses; standard; enterprise; and application and database.

The standard offering contains the likes of NetBackup and PureDisk client software, whereas the enterprise version contains more advanced options such as VCB. The application and database pack will offer support for all databases, according to Symantec.

As well as consolidating its offerings, the vendor is also introducing a per-Tbyte pricing model in an attempt to charge users for the amount of storage used, as opposed to the pieces of software they have deployed. Symantec's Kixmoeller told Byte and Switch that specific pricing details will be released when NetBackup 6.5 is available in the third quarter.

Seattle Pacific University's Rand told Byte and Switch that licensing issues have often been an issue with his NetBackup deployments. "One of the things that has been a real annoyance is figuring out whether you're in compliance with the licenses or not," he says. "Periodically, I have to manually, and in excruciating detail, go through my licenses and ensure that I am in compliance."

Symantec's other big announcement today was its Storage United initiative, a somewhat nebulous attempt to combine different parts of the vendor's software portfolio; data protection, storage management, and archiving.The vendor is touting data protection products such as NetBackup as the first elements of the Storage United push, and it is planning to tie this closer to storage management and archiving, although specific details are hard to come by. "We're going to be making announcements over the next few months in each of these three areas," says Kris Hagerman, Symantec's group president for data center management.

Symantec has been pushing interoperability for some time now, and opted, for example, to open up the APIs within NetBackup last year. (See Symantec Launches API.) Since then, eight companies have signed up to access these APIs, according to Kixmoeller, including NetApp, Sepaton, Data Domain, and Diligent. (See NetApp Highlights De-Dupe, Sepaton Closes $22M, Data Domain Prices $78M IPO, and Diligent Unveils SME Solutions.)

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch