Symantec's NetBackup Upgrade Targets VM Backup and Recovery
Symantec last week rolled out the first upgrade to its NetBackup enterprise backup and recovery service in two years. The company said it gave NetBackup 7.6 a significant performance boost and tuned it up for environments using its replication engine for vSphere.
While Symantec is arguably the leading provider of enterprise backup and recovery software, a slew of challengers are targeting its dominance and have focused on the proliferation of virtual datacenters. Many have argued that NetBackup was not keeping up with this trend.
Though not pointing to any specific problems with NetBackup 7.5, Symantec Senior Product Marketing Manager Glen Simon said there is a companywide emphasis on improving Symantec's software. "Across the board there's an increased emphasis on quality," Simon said. "This release is preparing customers for the next generation of the modern datacenters."
On a high level Symantec said NetBackup 7.6 is designed for organizations that are evolving their infrastructure to software-defined datacenters. The new release is designed to automate large-scale data protection even for those at the cusp of making that transition. According to the company's own research, the amount of data organizations are creating is increasing at up to 70 percent yearly, which the new release is designed to address by providing more automation and faster performance.
Simon emphasized that NetBackup 7.6 also addresses the shift to the growth of virtual machines and targets VMware environments. Specifically it uses NetBackup Replication Director to protect VMware environments, according to Simon. It can also use NetApp snapshots taken from its arrays to protect virtualized environments. The new release can recover VMware vSphere VMs 400 times faster than its predecessor, the company claims.
VMware's dominance notwithstanding, it's not the only hypervisor organizations are using. So what about Microsoft's Hyper-V? "Going forward one of the major focuses on the next release will be Hyper-V," Simon said.
Given the competitive landscape and growth of Hyper-V, the company would be wise not to wait another two years for that upgrade.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/27/2014 at 9:54 AM