Veritas Beefs Up Archival, Backup Technology

During what is likely Veritas Software Corp.s final end-user conference before its acquisition by security giant Symantec Corp. becomes official as early as next month, the storage software maker this week introduced a number of upgrades to its backup and archiving portfolio. These upgrades are buoyed by partner-driven, integrated disk-based data protection and content management capabilities.

At the Veritas Vision 2005 Conference in San Francisco, Veritas announced the enhanced Veritas NetBackup 6.0, featuring deep integration with Network Appliance Inc. data snapshot technology. Available this summer, the product allows storage administrators to schedule, discover, browse, move and recover their snapshots through optimization with NetApps NearStore disk-to-disk offering, said officials of Mountain View, Calif.-based Veritas.

/zimages/1/28571.gifWill a combined Symantec/Veritas unify data protection?Read one view here.

NetBackup 6.0 offers a central Web-based management and reporting portal through the NetBackup Operations Manager, an integrated console providing an infrastructure-wide view of all data protection operations, the management of data resources, and a real-time view into health and status of backups to combat potential data loss.

One beta tester of NetBackup 6.0 who plans to deploy the product later this year, Kevin Gungiah, director of systems administration for Atlanta-based The Weather Channel, said he plans to use the product to leap from disk-to-disk-to-tape backup over to disk-to-disk-to-disk for the 1.5TB of storage backed up daily. In fact, he said he will take full advantage of the bulked-up reporting and intelligence features in terms of trending and backup predictions that NetBackup 6.0 offers. Off-site backup is also a concern for Gungiah.

“Our data growth has been phenomenal,” said Gungiah. “We want to improve our backup performance. My disk-to-disk-to-disk solution is off-site, and we need the performance to send [data] across the wire to a central location. I really wanted something to push the backups out faster.”

The new NetBackup 6.0 is designed to work closely in tandem with Veritas Enterprise Vault 6.0 to allow customers to migrate data from a primary storage archive to a tape managed by NetBackup 6.0 based on policies for cheaper storage costs and long-term archival, according to Nick Mehta, senior director of the Product Management Group for Enterprise Vault at Veritas.

Building on its predecessor, which was focused on primarily storage management, e-mails and compliance purposes, Enterprise Vault 6.0 catapults the product toward addressing enterprise content archival needs. Due for release this summer, the product features journaling of Lotus Domino/Notes e-mail and support for SMTP messages, said Mehta.

On Tuesday, Veritas unveiled a partnership with Hummingbird Ltd. that integrates Enterprise Vault 6.0 with the Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 content management platform. The combined technology is designed to assist customers with management of electronic records, including e-mail, instant messages and file system documents through Microsoft Outlook. Joint customers of Veritas and Hummingbird will be able to take advantage of a unified interface between the software products.

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Originally brought to Veritas technology stable through its purchase of KVS last year, the beefed-up version of Enterprise Vault 6.0 includes support for archiving of Microsoft SharePoint documents, enabling customers to archive, compress, store, index and search old versions of SharePoint. In addition, the product allows users to search for and delete meddlesome PST files wherever they may be hidden in the network. Veritas has added filtering and categorization features into its Enterprise Vault software, enabling users to define rules within XML to boost archival intelligence.

With Enterprise Vault 6.0, Veritas is adding in support for IBM TotalStorage DR550 storage hardware systems, joining EMC Centerra and Network Appliance NearStore. New partnerships with Plasmon Inc. and Pegasus offer customers the capability to archive data to optical disks if they so choose.

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