A number of Equanet staff were lucky enough to attend a technical portfolio review with Symantec UK last week and boy was that an eye opener. I knew they had been buying companies and moulding their portfolio over the years and on the surface it looked disjointed, but when you get chance to review it and their strategy it quickly crystallises into a cohesive strategy. One area that we were lucky enough to discuss was backup and where it is going. This week Symantec have come to the table with yet another ground breaking advancement in their backup exec solution - Backup Exec 2012.
Backup Exec 2012 is focused on three key themes: Eliminating complexity; providing virtualisation-centric protection; one product, any recovery. As these themes are an essential component to the product, it makes sense to expand on each of them.
Eliminate Complexity
Flexible delivery models were needed in the form of software, appliances and cloud-based backup solutions. In addition, small businesses have some unique needs that should be accounted for. So, in addition to completely reworking thousands of lines of code, Symantec have provided Backup Exec in four standard editions:
Backup Exec V-Ray Edition for customers with 100 percent virtualised environments that don’t want to pay for a separate product.
Backup Exec Small Business Edition for small businesses with limited IT experience that want to protect their data with ease.
Backup Exec.cloud for customers who want simple off-premise data protection through a fully secure cloud-based service that is easy to setup, manage and configure.
Backup Exec 360 appliance for customers who want an all-in-one, affordable data protection solution for physical or virtual environments that reduces backup windows and storage and management costs.
In addition to the new editions above, Symantec have completed reworked the user interface that allows customers to focus on the resources they are protecting, rather than solely on the status of jobs. Administrators can monitor the backup status of critical application servers, see issues and performance over the last seven days and view other key indicators that allow them to make important decisions about how to properly protect their environment.
Virtualisation-Centric Protection
Symantec has listened to their customers who told them that they want one product to backup their physical and virtual infrastructure to reduce costs as well as increased visibility across their infrastructure.
While Backup Exec 2012 provides the best technology for physical and virtual infrastructures, the new offering Backup Exec 2012 V-Ray edition is focused on the 100 percent virtual environment. This product supports both VMware and Hyper-V environments. It also provides all of the benefits of V-Ray technology to Backup Exec customers.
One Product, Any Recovery
SMBs want complete recovery but it should be seamless as well as cost-effective to implement. Backup Exec 2012 simplifies bare-metal disaster recovery for servers. It provides hardware-free recovery with physical-to-virtual and backup-to-virtual conversions for instant restore in a virtual environment. And, recovery to the cloud makes it easy and inexpensive for SMB customers to integrate to their cloud environments.
A pretty good move from Symantec we are sure you will agree. If you need to know more or need help with your backup strategy you need to talk to Equanet.
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