NetBackup 7.6 to Be Released Later This Year

Symantec Corp. announced solutions and technical integrations with VMware, Inc. across its product portfolio to provide higher levels of protection for virtualized environments.

Together, they enable SMBs and enterprises to use the benefits of virtualization without compromising protection.

IT administrators are seeking flexible solutions to help accelerate virtualization as a first step in moving toward a cloud service delivery model. Symantec can address this transition with solutions now tightly integrated with VMware cloud infrastructure.

As companies move business critical applications
from physical to virtual, Symantec can help to:

• Provide deeper visibility and control of virtual applications
• Reduce impact on performance due to backup and recovery operations while increasing protection effectiveness
• Execute performance security and compliance trusted across virtual and cloud infrastructures
• Improve application storage performance and availability

Backup, Recovery and Archiving
Symantec Backup Exec and NetBackup help organizations of all sizes make the shift to virtualization faster, easier and smoother by giving IT administrators the agility and confidence to automate further and faster. By archiving and offloading stale data, Enterprise Vault enables customers to further reduce their data center footprint and scale the applications and systems that are targeted for virtualization.

NetBackup 7.6, scheduled to release later this year, plans to include NetBackup Accelerator now for VMware cloud infrastructure that provides up to 100 times faster backup while new NetBackup Instant Recovery for VMware cloud infrastructure will recover VMs 800 times faster. Planned new features for VMware vCloud Director and VMware vCenter Server will make management and automation easier.

The Backup Exec 2012 V-Ray Edition gives virtualization architects Backup Exec protection technology across mixed physical and VMware environments. This unified platform consolidates backup and restore efforts, eliminating the management problems inherent to point solutions.

Enterprise Vault, which is VMware Ready certified, helps customers scale their physical and virtual environments by managing and migrating old and stale data into the archive and reclaiming primary storage capacity. It can be virtualized and is optimized for VMware vSphere and VMware View, providing interoperability within a virtualized infrastructure.

As virtualization evolves to private clouds and customers begin adopting a multi-hypervisor strategy, IT organizations can no longer rely on point products to meet their data protection needs.

"Organizations small and large need a holistic protection strategy, a single platform or solution, to handle the variety of data types and workloads as opposed to integrating a number of disparate point solutions, which proves to be costly and time consuming," said Dave Russell, VP of Storage Technologies and Strategies, Gartner.

Security and Compliance
By integrating with VMware cloud infrastructure, Symantec security solutions enable joint customers to protect their virtual and cloud infrastructure and business-critical applications with data loss prevention, IT risk and compliance, improved threat monitoring and intelligence and optimized protection of virtualized endpoints and data centers.

To protect virtual data centers against advanced threats, Symantec Critical System Protection now supports vSphere 5 with granular, policy-based controls to protect and monitor the hypervisor, guest VMs and vCenter Server. The solution enables organizations to identify server compliance violations and suspicious activity in real-time, limit administrative control, restrict network communications and prevent file and configuration tampering of the virtual infrastructure, all as recommended in the VMware Hardening Guidelines.

To reduce both compliance and security risk, Symantec Control Compliance Suite allows to automate compliance assessment and reporting processes, enabling to identify risk and prioritize remediation activities across both physical and virtual infrastructure. Symantec Security Information manager (SSIM) and Symantec’s Managed Security Service (MSS) both leverage the VMware vShield log management collector to augment an organization’s ability to identify and respond to security threats that impact business critical applications across both their physical and virtual infrastructures.

Symantec also has a beta program underway to finalize new features for Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 which includes VMware vShield Endpoint integration to deliver additional deployment options for improved performance. The upcoming release will offload critical security analysis from protected VMs to a dedicated security virtual appliance resulting in optimized scan performance, reduced resource utilization, and increased management visibility.

Storage and Availability Management
By using Symantec’s storage management and HA platform within VMware environments, customers can confidently virtualize all their applications and move to the cloud with support for application availability, better storage visibility, storage optimization and the ability to bridge the gap between physical and virtual environments.

The new release of Symantec’s Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware cloud infrastructure integrates directly into VMware vCenter Server and adds support for vSphere 5 and planned support for vSphere 5.1. Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware 6.0 helps organizations improve SAN storage I/O performance and availability for vSphere. In addition, Dynamic Multi-Pathing provides deeper visibility into the underlying storage, enabling views from applications in VMs to storage spindle and gathering performance statistics to enable better decision-making.

Symantec is also announcing the beta version of Cluster Server solution targeting the VMware platform to provide organizations with reliable HA and DR for applications running in virtual infrastructures. Symantec substantially minimizes planned and unplanned downtime for mission critical applications such as Oracle, SAP, Exchange, SQL Server and Apache that are running in a virtual world. The new solution will provide automatic application failover between VMware VMs ensuring faster application recovery without compromising VMware capabilities like VMware vMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler. Symantec’s Cluster Server can be managed directly through VMware vCenter Server to simplify operations.

"As leaders in security and virtualization respectively, Symantec and VMware are jointly innovating to help customers accelerate the move to the cloud with confidence. Symantec’s deep integration with VMware enables companies to take advantage of the productivity of virtualization and the cloud without compromising protection," said Francis deSouza, group president, Enterprise Products and Services, Symantec.

"Symantec demonstrates an ongoing and consistent commitment to supporting VMware cloud infrastructure and provides valuable resources for organizations looking to expand their virtual environments and move to public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Smart integrations in security, backup and storage solutions create an opportunity for organizations to securely pursue the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing," said Bogomil Balkansky, SVP, Cloud Infrastructure Products, VMware.

"Security is paramount for us, and Symantec solutions not only help Carrington protect its sensitive data but have also supported a seamless move towards virtualization. We now have approximately 80 percent of our servers virtualized and the performance of these virtual servers improved substantially with Symantec Endpoint Protection 12. Symantec proactively protects our information whether it’s in a physical or virtual environment," said Brent Rasmussen, EVP and CIO, Carrington Holding Company LLC.

"Maintaining consistency and simplicity in our backup operations amidst the move to virtualization and the cloud has been a top priority for us. Symantec’s NetBackup 5220 appliance with V-Ray technology is the single solution we needed to allow our focus to remain on ensuring recovery – whether from tape, disk, snapshot or cloud and across virtual and physical platforms. Finding one solution that combines backup, deduplication and replication into a single purpose-built appliance gives us confidence that we are fully protected so that we can focus on doing what our business does best," said Mark Moroses, SVP and CIO, Continuum Health Partners, Inc.

"Kemira runs all of our servers under VMware, so Enterprise Vault’s VMware Ready certification assures us of the stability of Enterprise Vault in a VMware environment. This has helped us solve our archiving requirements while lowering the total cost of ownership and providing native HA and DR capabilities offered by VMware," said Ari Poyhonen, manager, IT Infrastructure Projects, Kemira.

"IT permeates everything we do, which means that managing security and risk is critical. With a vast and diverse collection of endpoints that spans across our systems and to our virtualized data center, we rely on Symantec to deliver extensive protection along with operational cost savings. Symantec proactively protects our information whether it’s in a physical or virtual environment," said Reinoud Reynders, IT manager for Infrastructure and Operations, University Hospitals Leuven.

"We’ve virtualized many critical servers and Symantec NetBackup gives us the ability to efficiently back up our VMware virtual environment, as well as restore individual files from VMs (VMs) without restoring the entire VMDK image. We have a few key partners that support our virtualization strategy, and Symantec is one of those. I’m very happy that we made a good choice," said Barbara MacKenzie, IS Operations and Infrastructure manager, Sydney Adventist Hospital.