Did anyone else catch the irony? Symantec’s recent announcement on the general availability of NetBackup™ 7, the next major release of their flagship data protection suite, landed squarely on Groundhog Day 2010. One of my personal favorite holidays and movies notwithstanding, the timing invoked Bill-Murray-like groans of “Here we go again!” to many of those tasked with managing data protection applications in their respective organizations.
Another Upgrade?
It seems only yesterday that many of us were just putting the specter of the NetBackup 5.x to 6.x upgrade behind us, with its significant changes in the underlying code base as well as the migration of catalogs from flat file to a new RDBMS structure. We finally just figured out new features and performance tunings after a number of maintenance patches (OK bug fixes) and finally got our arms around the true power and exceptional capabilities of the release somewhere in version 6.5.
Now version 7 looms like that mythical rock that we get to push up the mountain one more time. But when we actually are brave enough to poke our head out of the burrow this time, we will rejoice in the fact that this new release casts a much different, and more attractive, shadow than we’ve seen in the past.
Data Protection at its Best
Symantec has capitalized on their new structural platform introduced in v6 to move forward and integrate five products into one: NetBackup, Puredisk, Realtime (Continuous Data Protection), NOM (Network Operations Manager), and VBR (Veritas Backup Reporter).
What this really means for IT organizations is the ability to address most of today’s key data protection challenges, which I prioritize as:
- Using integrated data de-duplication to help with protecting the relentless juggernaut that is data growth
- Utilizing integrated replication in support of the ever-increased blurring of data protection and disaster recovery
- Employing advanced data protection techniques for virtualized environments
- Improving visibility into and management of the expanding data protection ecosphere
- Support for the advance of new environments needing protection, including Windows 7 and Exchange 2010
But as promising as this seems on the surface, what do the tea-leaves portent around ease-of-adoption? Symantec reports that 200 customers participated in beta testing with a 96% “recommend adopting” result. In addition, some 500 real world customers participated in the “first availability” phase—the most ever. Symantec claims to have doubled the number of system tests including a 24% increase of test case scenarios over their very successful 6.5.4 release.
NetBackup 7 promises to be one of the best “dot-oh” releases from Symantec/Veritas. More promising is the feature rich set of options now fully integrated that solve real world business challenges presented to IT Operations teams. Moreover, any managed services or solution provider worth its salt is already prepared to help transition customers forward. With 7.1 release already visible on the roadmap, it is very worthy of our attention now, fully anticipating we will be smiling, for sure, come Independence Day.
Steve Bulmer
Chief Technology Officer
Tags: Data Protection, managed services, NetBackup