Barnaby Wood, Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing joined Veritas 15 years ago – before Symantec acquired it. He thinks of the announced spin-off and recreation of the Veritas name as ‘coming home’. Backup Exec (BE) is a key software solution for backing up, archiving and restoring data. It has 2.2m (typically) SMB and mid-range customers, while Symantec’s Enterprise customers tend to use NetBackup. I thought you’d like an update from the discussion we had recently.
Keeping BE relevant
Symantec added support for a number of new operating systems and applications in its BE 2014 SP1 update in September[1] and with SP2 in December[2]. Answering the criticism that it was taking too long to introduce new versions, it also adopted a ‘quarterly cadence’ with the intention of support major new products within 60 days of introduction; a timetable it beat by 30 days in adding support for VMware’s vSphere 6 in the introduction of BE 15 in March. It would also have had early support for Windows Server 10 if Microsoft hadn’t pushed back its introduction to 2016. It has decided to make platform support a higher priority than new features.
New supported platforms and features
Symantec has enhanced BE with version 15 in 3 areas:
- Extending virtual and cloud – support for VMware vSphere 6, ESXi 6.0 and vCenter 6.0, vSAN 6.0 and 5.5 and Virtual Volumes and for EVO:RAIL hyperconverged systems. It has also extended cloud integration to include Amazon Virtual Tape Library (VLT) and EC2
- Keeping pace with data growth – its Granular Restore Technology (GRT) can now handle virtual disks larger than 2TB. Its Granular Recovery can now handle GPT partitioned disks. It has also added support for SAN restore and HotAdd SATA disk drives
- Reducing cost and complexity – has added ‘per terabyte’ pricing to lower costs and enable additional services. BE 15 also allows management, deployment and upgrades from a single centralised place. Customers can upgrade from 2010 R3 and newer BE versions faster and with greater simplicity than before.
Users can integrate virtual, local and remote office backups into the cloud applying a single backup with a single license meter to Amazon’s VLT Gateway and can restore directly from the cloud and/or archive to Amazon Glacier if they wish. They can also protect against network outages by linking cloud backup with on-premise disaster recovery, for which it will add Microsoft Azure in a few weeks’ time to the already-supported Amazon clouds.
It envisages the use of BE 15 by cloud service providers to provide hosted disaster recovery, managed backup and restore testing services for those customers who want other companies to look after their backup processes.
Simple capacity pricing improved
With the introduction of BE 15 Symantec has decided to lower the price of its Capacity Edition pricing by up to 42% and introduce a lower-featured ‘Capacity Edition Lite’ version for even cheaper level: prices for the former start at about €3k/TB of front-end data and latter at about €1.8k, with discounts for larger capacities. It’s also making it easier for customers to trade up to capacity pricing whether they have active or inactive maintenance contracts.
Symantec’s recent customer survey found that customers have challenges in 3 areas. In particular:
- Trust – don’t trust their backup processes and lack confidence in their ability to fix problems.
- Planning – don’t know how to plan their DR and backup strategy and have to go through lots of iterative processes to build a system
- Performance – want improved performance, but don’t know if the performance of their processes are optimally tuned.
In consequence it’s making changes to the supported features and platforms, development and announcement schedule of BE to meet their needs. The change of focus and name should allow Veritas to continue to deliver richer, simpler and more relevant versions of BE going forward.
Further Research
ARCServer
Symantec’s bifurcation
Asigra
[1] Windows 2012 R2, Windows 8.1, Oracle 11 2.0.4 and Microsoft SQL 2014
[2] Oracle 12c, Microsoft Exchange 2013 CU6, as well as updates for SQL 2008, RedHat, SuSe and Novell Open Enterprise server
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