NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012 Available

Symantec Corp. announced that Symantec NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012 are available worldwide to help businesses of any size seamlessly transform and modernize their outdated, complex and resource-intensive backup strategy.

Symantec is also announcing an agreement with NetApp, Inc. to resell the new NetBackup Replication Director option, enabling customers to unify snapshot and replication management within NetBackup, and remove the cost and risk associated with multiple backup and recovery tools. It enables organizations to reduce management costs and complexity by recovering and managing backup and replicated snapshots from a single NetBackup management console.

With the availability of Backup Exec 2012 and NetBackup 7.5, Symantec is providing customers and partners with a set of solutions that eliminate the problems that have plagued traditional backup in the past – complexity, time and resources required to manage the backup process, and the need for multiple point products to ensure a backup and recovery process. A recent Symantec survey of 1,400 IT professionals worldwide further demonstrates the industry-wide need for a newer and faster approach to backup, with 28 percent stating that they have too many backup tools and 72 percent citing their willingness to switch backup products if their speed doubled.

News Highlights

• NetBackup 7.5 increases backup speeds up to 100 times, improves the ability to recover and makes it possible to integrate NetApp Snapshots with backup. It also simplifies the search and recovery of files for legal holds.
• Backup Exec 2012 has revolutionized its management console, setting a standard for design, reduced complexity across physical and virtual environments, and comprehensive disaster recovery. More than 1,000 partners participated in the Backup Exec 2012 Partner Beta program and more than 2,000 customers and partners participated in the First Availability Early Adopters program, allowing them to install the final build prior to the availability of Backup Exec 2012.
• Symantec also announced an expanded agreement with NetApp to resell NetBackup Replication Director to enable IT administrators to centralize the management of NetBackup and NetApp Snapshots and replication (SnapVault and SnapMirror) for faster backup and recovery. The partnership enables to provide customers with a combination of features and benefits delivered by these two technologies.
• Symantec is listed as a Champion in Info-Tech Research Group’s Enterprise Backup Software Vendor Landscape report, which helps enterprise IT decision-makers identify a short list of vendors for their IT programs depending on their needs. According to the report, "On a relative basis, Symantec maintained the highest Info-Tech Value Score of the vendor group. Vendors were indexed against Symantec’s performance to provide a complete, relative view of their product offerings."
• Backup Exec 2012 is also VMware Ready Data Protection certified for vSphere 5.0. This certification includes support for new features in vSphere 5.0 including the Hardware Version 8 format of virtual machines, datastore clusters, vSphere Storage DRS, and Storage vMotion.
• Symantec offers delivery models including software, appliance and cloud solutions to integrate into any IT infrastructure. In addition to integration with Nirvanix, NetBackup now supports cloud storage from AT&T, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. The new Backup Exec Cloud DR Option powered by Doyenz, Inc., the recovery as a service provider – is expected to be available in the first half of FY13 and enable cloud-based application recovery in less than 15 minutes. Symantec’s Backup Exec also includes backup to the cloud through Nirvanix.
• SaaS-based backup and recovery service Backup Exec.cloud is also available in the United States, Canada and Europe for purchase directly from Symantec partners or direct from Symantec.
• Symantec offers converged backup and deduplication appliances that support disk, tape, and cloud storage targets and offer a single contact for support. The NetBackup 5220 appliance, introduced in October 2011, recently won an award in the 2011 Backup Hardware of the Year
• Symantec’s breadth of backup products helps customers realize cost savings while better protecting their business information. Symantec is committed to driving out 80 percent of the operating costs associated with backup over the next five years.

"With Symantec solutions, backup has never been simpler," confirmed Deepak Mohan, senior vice president, Information Management Group, Symantec. "We are committed to providing businesses with the tools they need to manage their information now and as the explosion in data continues. With NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012, we are leading the way in the fight against complex and time consuming processes and mitigate the risk of data loss."

"BackupExec 2012 has become an integral part of our IT infrastructure as it supports our virtualization strategy and allows us to keep six months of data online without having to go to tape – saving us a considerable amount in storage costs," said Scott Gould, senior network & systems analyst, Gynecologic Oncology Group Statistical & Data Center. "Plus, BackupExec 2012 is extremely easy to use so everyone on our IT staff can set up backups, manage backup policies and perform disaster recoveries, which is ideal for smaller IT departments."

"We use Symantec NetBackup to protect more than 800 Exchange databases – over two petabytes of data in seven datacenters, with 99 percent accuracy on backups and 99 percent success rate on recoveries. And we use it for 20 to 30 recoveries a week," said Jonathan McCormick, COO of leading cloud service provider and hosted Exchange provider, Intermedia. "Symantec NetBackup 7.5 provides us with a single integrated appliance to simplify all of our backup deployment and operations. The confidence we get from Symantec NetBackup is a good feeling."

"We have been looking forward to NetBackup 7.5, due to its support for vSphere 5. We’ve been using NetBackup 7’s innovative integration with VMware vSphere for a couple of years, and we have dramatically improved the protection for our rapidly growing virtual environment by moving the agents ‘out of the guest’ with NetBackup," said Seth H. Bokelman, senior systems administrator, University of Northern Iowa. "We’re also looking forward to implementing the NetBackup Accelerator technology, as it will make backups much faster on some of our large file servers."