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New backup option

Symantec Corp. has announced it will deliver a new approach for modernising backup and recovery, a process that has become unnecessarily complicated and expensive as organisations’ data stores grow exponentially. Compared to traditional backup, Symantec’s approach enables 100 times faster backup, eases management and simplifies recovery if a disaster occurs, helping customers realise significant cost savings while better protecting their business information.

Over the last 20 years data has exploded, virtualisation has become widely adopted and service level agreements (SLAs) have become near impossible to meet. These challenges also affect the smaller businesses that struggle with backup complexity and are at risk of data loss due to a disaster. The current approach to modernisation introduces an ever-growing collection of point solutions resulting in added complexity, increased costs and headaches for backup administrators, network administrators and executives.

“The single most dramatic change is scale – or volume – of data, applications and virtual machines which cannot be processed by current backup environments. Organisations have increased service level agreements, rising expectations of availability and the need to run in a 24/7 business model. When combined with trying to integrate new technologies, it adds up to a disruptive environment with a huge impact on IT teams. Organisations small and large need a holistic protection strategy, a single platform or solution, to handle the variety of data types and workloads as opposed to integrating a number of disparate point solutions, which proves to be costly and time consuming,” said Dave Russell, vice president of Storage Technologies and Strategies, Gartner.

“Today, Symantec unveils a radical new plan to modernise data protection that will drive out 80% of the operating costs associated with backup over the next five years,” said Hervé Lequippe, director, Regional Product Management, Information Management Group, Symantec Corporation. “Symantec is announcing a new set of solutions that address the problems in backup – from the most complex of enterprise data centres requiring a true tiered-recovery strategy to the smallest business that needs the confidence that they can easily recover their data.”

Symantec recently surveyed more than 1400 IT professionals worldwide on their backup practices and their ability to recover information in the event of a disaster. The findings reveal that traditional approaches to backup are broken and a new approach is vitally needed:

* 49% of respondents cannot meet service level agreements (SLAs) due to too much data.

* 72% of respondents would switch backup product if speed doubled.

* 28% say they have too many backup tools.

* Organisations average four backup solutions to protect physical systems, and three for virtual.

* 42% of respondents believe that their virtualisation backup is not adequately or perfectly working.

* 36% of respondents would not bet their pay cheques that 100% of backed-up data could be recovered.

According to Symantec’s 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, SMBs are not making disaster preparedness a priority until they experience a disaster or data loss. Half of respondents do not have a plan in place and 41% said that it never occurred to them to put together a disaster recovery plan. The survey data reveals that the cost of not being prepared is high, putting an SMB at risk of going out of business.

Sheldon Hand

Key components to Symantec’s unique approach to data protection are the NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012 software and cloud solutions, designed to help Symantec’s more than two million backup customers address backup issues common to companies all over the world. Symantec’s strategy focuses on the following areas:

* Change the operating model of backup: To eliminate 80% of the operating cost of backup by delivering an integrated platform that replaces multiple solutions typically used in backup today. Symantec backup appliances can drive down costs even more than traditional appliances by combining backup software and deduplication into a single solution supported by a one vendor, that is fast to deploy and easy to manage. The ability to combine software, appliance and cloud-based backup solutions provides customers greater choice and flexibility.

* Break the backup window: 100 times faster backup with NetBackup 7.5, compared to traditional approaches, means organisations can complete full backups at the speed of incremental backups without sacrificing recoverability to meet critical service levels.

* Fight infinite retention: Too many organisations keep backups for too long. Knowing when information can be deleted can significantly reduce costs and management burdens on IT. New backup search capabilities in NetBackup give IT the ability to separate out what is relevant to legal or compliance investigations while keeping the rest of the backup infrastructure running on a more typical 30-60-90 day backup cycle. Infinite retention is infinite waste for IT and infinite risk for legal.

* Stop putting tapes on trucks: With the help of Symantec NetBackup technology, organisations can modernise their disaster recovery strategies and stop the practice of shipping tapes by truck. Symantec NetBackup Auto Image Replication (AIR) allows customers to eliminate volumes of physical assets and prioritise files that can be sent over the network, while significantly reducing the chance for human error.

* Unite virtual and physical backups: Reduce operating costs around virtualisation with patent pending Symantec V-Ray technology that enables organisations to have deeper visibility into their VMware and Hyper-V machines for virtual backups with a single product. Integrated in NetBackup and Backup Exec, V-Ray delivers load balanced virtual machine backups to eliminate backup storms, improve virtual machine performance and reduce storage by deduplicating data everywhere, whether it is on VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers resulting in up to 90% storage reduction.

* One product for any recovery: Symantec provides one solution for all backups whether they are based on tape, disk, or in physical or virtual environments. Customers can recover any application or system to a virtual machine whether they have the hardware or not. Physical to virtual recovery is now included for free in Backup Exec, simplifying disaster recovery by automatically creating a virtual machine when recovery is needed. New backup to virtual (B2V) technology is also available to accelerate the migration from physical to virtual servers as part of the backup process.

* Eliminate complexity: Backup Exec has eliminated backup management complexity by simplifying the user interface, utilising insights from millions of users, policies and licensing. This allows IT administrators and SMB owners to have a professional data protection strategy without being backup professionals.

* Easy backup: Symantec introduces Backup Exec Small Business Edition ensuring smaller companies can set-up proper data protection in less than 10 minutes and in three simple steps. In addition Symantec expands Backup Exec.cloud into Europe providing those customers who prefer a simple, automated and hosted backup offering a reliable, secure solution.

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