Veritas Broadens Data Management Integration with Microsoft Azure

Veritas is upgrading its entire data management software portfolio with performance improvements and more extensive support for hybrid and public clouds with extended integration with Microsoft Azure.

The deeper integration for Azure is key among the announcements at this week's annual Veritas Vision customer and partner conference in Las Vegas, as well as the news of the company extending data deduplication and optimization of its flagship NetBackup, and Backup Exec backup and recovery and DR offerings. The company also today is introducing a software-defined storage offering designed for massive amounts of data called Veritas Cloud Storage, designed to apply intelligent analytics and classification to improve data discovery.

Late in addressing support for major public clouds including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, Veritas last year stepped up its effort after spinning off from Symantec by delivering native integration with the major public clouds in NetBackup 8 and Backup Exec 16. At the time, Veritas pledged to offer better support for all three of the largest global public clouds, making data protection and management across hybrid environments a priority. 

Among the key promises at last year's Vision partner and customer conference, Veritas had annouced a partnership with Microsoft to add deeper support for its Azure public cloud. Earlier this year the two companies extended their agreement to include Veritas data archiving solutions, including Enterprise Vault.

The deliverables announced this week include integrated support of Veritas' data archiving, management and orchestration tools with Azure. Specifically, the Veritas Resiliency Platform (VRP), which provides backup and disaster recovery management, orchestration and automation across multiple clouds and on-premises storage, establish Azure as a recovery target. It provides monitoring failover and failback to and from Azure.

Also, a new release of the Veritas Access software-defined storage NAS scale-out file system supports Azure cloud storage. Veritas Access enables simultaneous access for multiprotocol file and object types such as NFS, CIFS, FTP, SMB and S3. And the company's relatively new Veritas Information Map, a visualization tool designed to give administrators a real-time, aggregated and detailed view of where data is stored for cost management and risk mitigation, will support Azure Blob Storage and Azure File Storage, as well as other Microsoft cloud storage services.

Veritas launched Information Map with a grand plan of giving administrators extensive visibility across the spectrum of cloud and on-premises storage. Building on that product, the company announced the new Connection Center, a designed link to provide visibility into 23 different cloud stores, with more planned. In addition to adding support for Azure Blob Storage and Azure File Storage, Veritas said it will be rolling out connectors to OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, G Suite, Google Cloud Platform Cloud Storage, AWS S3, Office 365, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

The company said Veritas Information Map can help determine which data must be preserved to help meet compliance regulations, such as the forthcoming European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which takes effect next year. Veritas Information Map connectors will support a variety of other Microsoft and third-party data sources. This integration with Azure will be available in the coming quarters.

The new NetBackup 8.1, aimed at large enterprises, brings improved data deduplication to improve backup and recovery times and lower bandwidth utilization. Also new in the release is Parallel Streaming, aimed at supporting hyperconverged clusters and scale-out backups for big data workloads, including support for HDFS.

A new release of Veritas Backup Exec 16 FP2 for small and midsize organizations also offers improved deduplication and the new CloudConnect Optimizer to improve network bandwidth utilization. Also building on its support for Azure released last year, the Backup Exec upgrade will add compatibility with Azure Government and Azure Germany, as well as Amazon Web Services S3 storage and Google Cloud regional class storage.

The new Veritas Cloud Storage offering, now in beta, is aimed at huge amounts of data. The company said its new data store, which, in addition to supporting AWS S3 and standard Swift object storage protocols, will offer support for MQTT and COAP for addressing new IoT workloads. Veritas said organizations can use it in geodistributed scenarios and can support complex storage polices, suited for GDPR and other environments where sensitive data are handled.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/20/2017 at 12:32 PM