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Symantec on Oct. 2 introduced a new appliance form factor for one software product that pays most of the company bills: NetBackup.
The NetBackup 5330 appliance, a media server with scalable capacity and optimizations for improved performance and resiliency over previous appliances, now takes its place on company SKU (stock keeping unit) lists.
A lot of people don’t realize that Symantec isn’t just a software company. The Mountain View, Calif.-based firm has been making data security software to go with its own branded hardware to house it for about four years.
Only in the couple of years, however, have the appliance sales numbers begun to move steadily upward as more users find out that they’d rather have a preconfigured appliance sitting in a data center doing tasks in automation instead of a server that requires human interaction to maintain.
In fact, storage-related appliances are all the rage in the industry right now. The idea of “setting it and forgetting it” has attracted serious interest, thanks to the increasing amount of business intelligence that is being stored in the software. IT managers have other things to think about.
“Customers have told us they derive more value from managing their information than from managing their infrastructure,” Symantec SVP of Appliance Solutions Matt Cain wrote in his corporate blog. “We took that input and pioneered a new approach, delivering the integrated, purpose-built backup appliance (PBA) that combined the intelligence of NetBackup with compute, network and storage resources.”
The NetBackup 5330 appliance doubles the deduplication pool capacity compared to earlier NetBackup appliance versions, providing room for future growth, Drew Meyer, director of marketing for NetBackup, told eWEEK. The new appliance stores up to a whopping 229TB with twice the backup performance and four times the recovery performance as previous Symantec appliances, Meyer said.
Other features include mix-and-match deduplication, advanced disk deduplication for either client or target, replication, and integrated security software using Symantec Critical System Protection.
Symantec, with NetBackup and BackupExec, owns about 33 percent of the enterprise data backup market and positions NetBackup 7.6, released last January, as the “only backup product designed for enterprise-level scale.”
IDC reported last March that Symantec continues to be the fastest-growing player in this space. The company competes with vendors that include CommVault, Asigra, Veeam, Microsoft Azure, VMware, STORServer, Dell Quest, EMC Avamar, HP StoreOnce and several others.