Symantec Corp.

Symantec NetBackup 5220 Backup Appliance Assumes Its Own Identity

2012-05-08T19:15:00Z

When Symantec shipped its first backup appliances in late 2010, it could arguably be said the primary intention of these appliances was to simplify the deployment of Backup Exec and NetBackup at customer sites by shipping both hardware and software as a single SKU. While that still holds true, these appliances also opened the door for them to offer specific features and assume their own unique identities. The new NetBackup 5220 begins to deliver on that promise as it now offers specific software and features that make it much more than just a "server with NetBackup software pre-installed on it."

Everyone generally knows that the simplicity associated with deploying backup appliances have made them a hot ticket in customer environments. This is a big reason that the market for these devices is forecasted to grow by 17% annually over the next couple of years. But what many are recognizing is that these appliances can be much more than just shrink-wrapped packages with backup software and server and storage hardware.

The Symantec NetBackup 5220 represents one of the first backup appliances to take advantage of the new possibilities that backup appliances create. In the 5220, we see this in two ways.

First, Symantec bundles more software from other parts of its product line.
Second, Symantec introduces new features into the 5220 that enhances its overall value beyond simple backup.

As the above image illustrates, there are two new software products that Symantec NetBackup 5220 now includes. On the left hand side is Symantec Critical System Protection that is deployed as an unmanaged agent on the NetBackup 5220. Using this agent, the 5220 will do host intrusion detection thereby monitoring and auditing itself and generate alerts if anyone accesses it. If they do, administrators may then see what they have doing on the appliance (changing files, which applications they have been accessing, etc.)

Those organizations that already use Critical System Protection within their environment to protect physical and virtual servers may alternatively activate the agent and make it a managed agent. When used this way, organizations may integrate it with their existing Critical System Protection server and then centrally manage the NetBackup 5220 as part of their broader intrusion prevention scheme.

On the right hand side we see that Symantec introduces WAN optimization into the 5220. In this case, Symantec has partnered to introduce this software to optimize outbound traffic. In its internal testing, Symantec has consistently seen about a 2x performance increase whether replicating to other appliances at other sites or even when replicating to the cloud.

Of the two, replicating to the cloud was a driver behind the introduction of this feature. As NetBackup had already extended its support for cloud providers to include AT&T, Amazon and Rackspace in addition to Nirvanix, more of its customers were looking to leverage this new NetBackup option to store data in the cloud. So by introducing WAN optimization into the 5220 itself, they now get the flexibility to do so.

Yet what I personally found most intriguing about this release is how the NetBackup 5220 is prompting the need for new feature functionality to be added into the NetBackup software itself and then shipped with the NetBackup 5220 even before it ships with NetBackup. In this particular case, the NetBackup 5220 was encountering a specific challenge when it was deployed to backup some VMware environments.

If asked to be an off-host backup in a VMware environment with shared storage, it would want to leverage the VMware API to make a snapshot of the VM so it would not impact the ESX host. However to perform that off-host VM backup, it still required a Windows box somewhere. While this could be the backup server, since the NetBackup 5220 uses Linux, the 5220 used to rely on some external Windows server to perform the backup as VMware's data protection APIs were primarily designed to work in Windows environments.

However in working with VMware, they jointly developed a functional API for Linux. Now the NetBackup 5220 no longer needs either a physical or virtual Windows host to do off-host backups of VMs. It may now perform this backup itself. Symantec refers to this as direct vSphere backups.

Making this particular functionality noteworthy is that it is currently only available on the NetBackup 5220. While Symantec plans to add it to the software version of NetBackup in an upcoming release, the general availability of this feature on the NetBackup 5220 before it ships on the flagship NetBackup software highlights how backup appliances in general and the NetBackup 5220 specifically are poised to offer a more end-to-end solution than what might normally be built by a backup team.

Backup appliances are a hot ticket in customer environments and few appliances are hotter than the NetBackup 5220. But what organizations have to realize is that full extent of the operational savings that can be achieved with a purpose-built backup appliance that offers more than just deduplication or backup.

This release of the NetBackup 5220 exemplifies a new breed of backup appliances that can perform a wider range of tasks. The NetBackup 5220's inclusion of the direct vSphere backup, Critical System Protection and WAN optimization software coupled with the new feature functionality in NetBackup itself that for, right now, can only be found on the NetBackup 5220 indicates the broader potential that NetBackup appliances have to reduce backup complexity and drive down the cost of backup.

An In-Depth Explanation of Why Data Ownership Issues Persist in Microsoft SharePoint and How to Resolve Them

2012-04-16T10:00:00Z

The move from NAS to Microsoft SharePoint is in full swing in many organizations as they look to leverage SharePoint to better track and manage their various documents. Yet what they are discovering is that the same fundamental questions that they had regarding file ownership and usage in NAS environments persist even after SharePoint is implemented. This is prompting organizations to once again turn to Symantec Data Insight to understand data usage and ownership in their SharePoint environments.

The number of organizations who are looking to adopt Microsoft SharePoint is, in a word, overwhelming. A 2010 survey found that 90% of the respondents already use SharePoint. It also found that the adoption rate of SharePoint is expected to reach 97% in organizations in the next few years.

This rapid adoption is driven in large part by the belief that SharePoint will solve many of the issues that file shares or NAS cannot address. In this respect, SharePoint certainly addresses some of them.

Security and policy based auditing, document check-in and check-out, and document version history are just a few of the new options that SharePoint brings to the table that NAS does not support. However one data management challenge of NAS that SharePoint does not resolve - and which many may incorrectly assume it does - is that of data ownership.

Part of the reason that SharePoint fails to fully resolve this issue of data ownership is that, like NAS, it takes the same approach to assigning file ownership. In other words, both NAS and SharePoint infer data ownership based on who originally created the data. While this sounds good in theory, in practice it is a flawed approach as it only works well in relatively small organizations (as small as 10 users or less!)

This approach does not take into account that users are the most fluid and rapidly changing aspect of any organization. As such, the individual who initially created the data may change departments, leave the company or eventually no longer need access to the data that he or she created. Unfortunately the methodology employed by both NAS and SharePoint assume the same owner for in perpetuity.

A better way - and the one employed by Symantec Data Insight - is to infer data ownership based upon who is currently and most frequently accessing the data. This more sophisticated technique takes into account how organizations evolve over time and that the individual or individuals who need to access the data also may need to change using real-time measurements of data access and usage to arrive at who should own the data.

In making a determination as to data ownership within SharePoint, Data Insight uses its SharePoint integration to audit how frequently data is accessed and by whom. It then calculates ownership based upon activity level.

Once a determination is made, organizations have two options to assign data ownership. Ownership may be assigned automatically based upon Data Insight's calculations. However many organizations use Data Insight to first identify the top three to five users of the data. They may then use that information to tag who they want to be data's custodian in addition to letting Data Insight automatically infer ownership.

Many organizations are rightfully moving from NAS to SharePoint to take advantage of SharePoint's advanced auditing and policy-based data management features. However SharePoint and NAS still are much more alike than different when it comes to establishing and determining data ownership. As such, the issue of establishing and maintaining data ownership persists in SharePoint environments.

This is why Data Insight's support and integration with SharePoint remains both relevant and necessary. It gives organizations the insight they need into who owns what data in their SharePoint environment as well as the reports they need to understand how it is being used and accessed. Using it, they are empowered to manage their SharePoint data in a manner that is as dynamic as the users who access it.

In the next part in this blog series on Data Insight, I take a look at its integration with Enterprise Vault and why this integration has become a necessity for effective data management.

Symantec Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware 6.0 Further Opens the Door for Enterprise Adoption of Mission Critical Apps on VMware vSphere

2012-04-03T13:30:00Z

VMware vSphere is clearly trending toward hosting more mission critical applications. However one objection that many enterprises still have to virtualizing these applications is the lack of an enterprise caliber multi-pathing software driver on VMware vSphere. Today the release of Symantec's Veritas Dymanic Multi-Pathing for VMware 6.0 not only overcomes that objection, it opens the door for enterprises to move more mission critical applications to VMware vSphere.

Before enterprises virtualize many mission critical applications, they need assurance that the virtualization solution meets certain prerequisites. Availability, compatibility, failover, load balancing, predictability, reliability and stability are just some of the tangible and intangible features that must be present before enterprises seriously entertain moving these applications to a virtualized infrastructure, as opposed to keeping them on physical systems.

A specific feature that has precluded enterprises from moving their mission critical applications on VMware vSphere is the lack of availability of an enterprise caliber multi-pathing driver for VMware. While vSphere natively includes its own Native Multi-pathing Plugin (NMP) and is universally supported by storage arrays, it lacks certain advanced multi-pathing features such as load balancing, proactive failover, and visibility into storage arrays. These are features that enterprises expect and need to justify moving their mission critical applications from a physical to a virtual environment.

Storage Array Multi-pathing Support

Source: DCIG, LLC

This is what makes today's Dymanic Multi-Pathing for VMware 6.0 announcement from Symantec so compelling. Enterprises for the first time have access to a robust third party multi-pathing driver that is already supported by nearly 70% of storage arrays on the market - more than 3x of its nearest competitor - but now with the flexibility to provide multi-pathing to any VMware guest VM.

A growing and deepening relationship between Symantec and VMware has enabled this functionality to see the light of day. To date, VMware have been extraordinarily protective of allowing applications - any application - to access its hypervisor kernel for good reason: an unstable application with access to its hypervisor could destabilize it and bring down the entire ESX host and all of its host VMs.

However Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing has over a decade of experience in mission critical enterprise environments and is already certified across a multitude of hypervisors (Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat Linux.) So it should come as no surprise that this wealth of experience coupled with VMware's desire to further extend its reach into enterprise environments has resulted in VMware granting Symantec's Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing access its kernel. Further, it is being done without using workarounds such as using a vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA).

Symantec Dynamic Multi-Pathing Placement in
VMware ESX Hypervisor

Source: Symantec

VMware granting Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing access to its hypervisor kernel is a win for everyone involved. It gives VMware what it needed - access to stable, high end multi-pathing software that is supported by the vast majority of storage arrays on the market. By enabling Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing to be placed in its hypervisor, VMware may now extend its reach into enterprise environments by overcoming one of the final objections that enterprises still have to virtualizing their missions critical applications using VMware.

Symantec also wins. Everyone from VMware to Symantec to enterprise shops recognized that moving Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing into the VMware kernel had to be addressed for VMware to continue its ascent into the enterprise. Now for any organization that wants multi-pathing software that gives them the flexibility to virtualize their environment using almost any vendor's storage array and get advanced multi-pathing functionality, Symantec Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing is the only logical choice enabling Symantec to maintain its firm hold on the leadership position in this space.

Finally and maybe most importantly, enterprises win. They can finally start to realistically look to virtualize the balance of their mission critical applications using VMware vSphere without having to sacrifice any of the storage availability, failover or visibility functions to which they were accustomed using Symantec DMP.

Multi-pathing software does not get nearly the attention it deserves. But as any individual responsible for supporting enterprise data centers understands multi-pathing software plays a critical role in delivering the type of functionality that enterprises need to justify virtualizing their enterprise applications.

By VMware granting Symantec Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing access to its hypervisor, one of the last technical objections to implementing VMware in mission critical environments is overcome. By Symantec offering Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing at about $900 per quad core processor, the business objections to implementing are also mitigated making it almost a no-brainer in terms of what multi-pathing solution to use.

Data Insight 3.0 Gives Business and IT Users The Information They Need to Engage

2012-03-12T12:00:00Z

Cost-effectively and efficiently managing ever-growing unstructured data stores is the next frontier that nearly every organization faces in storage management. But as they do so, they are coming to the realization that the IT staff who manage the storage and business owners who generate the data are not sufficiently engaged with one another to achieve these goals. Achieving a more structured, productive engagement between IT and business owners is what today's Symantec Data Insight 3.0 release enables.

Estimates as to how fast unstructured data is growing vary widely. While analyst estimates typically fall in the 50 - 75% year-over-year (YoY) growth range, some IT executives are also anecdotally sharing that they are seeing unstructured data growth rates in the YoY range of 400 - 800%.

This rapid data growth rate is resulting in similarly huge increases in organization storage needs. At least one analyst firm forecasts that the amount of storage organizations will acquire will quadruple by 2015 to keep up with these unstructured data growth rates.

But what gets overlooked in these stats is that the individuals who own the data are typically not the same ones who own and manage the backend storage. This creates gaps in communication and understanding between them as they seek to establish and/or understand:

Who owns the data
How the data is being used
The best ways to protect the data

Resolving these gaps in communication and understanding between IT and specific lines of business are the specific issues that Data Insight 3.0 addresses. Rather than IT and business owners possessing a more limited, siloed view into an organization's unstructured data stores, Data Insight gives them a more holistic view into their environment.

More importantly, Data Insight 3.0 enables them to productively engage with one another by giving them the information both groups need to make better data and storage management decisions. This is becoming particular important as growing, unmanaged unstructured data stores create new compliance risks. Absent the ability to understand who owns the data and should act as its custodian, a company cannot adequately or confidently meet internal or external regulatory requirements as they cannot perform thorough reviews of the data.

Three specific enhancements that Data Insight 3.0 offers to facilitate the engagement between these two groups and alleviate these compliance concerns include:

Data custodian management. Data Insight has always used heuristics, or experience-based techniques, to understand an organization's specific data usage patterns, permissions on specific files and folders, where data is located, etc. Data Insight 3.0 builds on these capabilities to create organizational maps for the following two reasons.

First, IT is often stuck watching backend storage requirements grow but are unsure who they should turn to on the business side to help them best manage this growth and optimize data placement. Second, individuals on the business side of the house are unaware of the impact that this unstructured data growth is having on the backend storage.

Now using Data Insight 3.0, organizations can discover who the ideal custodian(s) of the data should be on the business side of the house. In this way, IT can quickly identify the right business person in the organization and engage them so data may be placed on the right tier of storage, archived, or deleted to optimize storage capacity and performance. This feature also helps to ensure a company continually remains in compliance with the rules and regulations to which it is subject.

Extending platform coverage. Data Insight has always integrated with the Windows file sharing CIFS protocol. Data Insight 3.0 expands upon that by now offering support for UNIX servers that run the Veritas file system (VxFS) as well as expanding integration with SharePoint.

This new support also extends to integrating with the UNIX NFS file protocol that is found in high performance verticals such as is found in many NetApp environments. Along with it, Data Insight adds support for new directory services common to NFS/UNIX environments to include LDAP, NIS and NIS+.

Again, the significance of this feature of Data Insight 3.0 as it relates to IT engaging specific lines of business is that IT is can now engage with more business units in the organization. The end game here is to further help drive storage consolidation by better understanding the data is used so they can make more efficient use of the available storage capacity.

Big data-like architecture. Mapping data to the right owner is only practical if the architecture of the product scales to the tens if not hundreds of terabytes found in enterprises. In response to this requirement, Data Insight 3.0 has employed techniques such as inverted indexing and custom joins that expedite data collection and indexing.

Then to make this process as non-disruptive as possible on the file server, it takes advantage of its advanced integration with NetApp and its own Veritas Storage Foundation platform to ensure that file sharing performance is not impacted while these collection and indexing activities are going on in the background.

Big Data is a Big Challenge in enterprises and, to effectively respond to it, they cannot rely solely on IT staff. Instead, they need both IT and the business sides of the house to work together to make effective data and storage management a reality. However that is only practical if both sides of the house have access to the information they need to understand each other's concerns.

Data Insight is that tool to make this goal a reality. While Data Insight has always given organizations the ability to understand data ownership, the new abilities in Data Insight 3.0 enable it to create organizational maps of who possesses the data, access data in new data stores, and scale to handle the large amounts of unstructured data that reside in these data repositories.

By putting this tool in place, enterprises have more reasons than ever to ask and expect the IT and business sides of the house to productively engage with the expectation that excuses for not being in compliance with existing rules and regulations to which the company is subject dissipating.

A Single Integrated Data Protection Solution is Coming; Interview with Symantec Sr Product Director Simon Jelley Part II

2012-03-05T11:00:00Z

Multiple interfaces, multiple products, and multiple systems to learn and become an "expert" in each one - such is the life of a backup administrator. Every administrator has at times longed for the day when he or she might be able to manage all of their backups and recovery operations, as well as virtual machine and replication snapshots, from a single, integrated interface. That day may be coming sooner than you think.

In this second part of my blog series with Symantec's Senior Director of Product Director, Simon Jelley, we look at how Symantec is working toward that goal, and how companies can prepare for that day now.

Jerome: As enterprise clients look toward being more efficient and cost effective, what is the biggest thing they need to be doing to prepare to change to a single data protection solution?

Simon: Moving toward a single solution is critical. Behind the scenes you have different groups vying for ownership of what I would call the "recovery responsibility" right now. If it is not clear who owns this recovery responsibility, then how can you assure your critical information and systems are protected? How do you ensure alignment across these teams when a disaster occurs?

When you look at the virtualization team, for example, coming on board, they are typically responsible for some degree of data protection, but only for the virtualized systems. What about the physical assets?

You also have the use of snapshots and replication in the picture, with the storage team covering that responsibility. Symantec is saying, "You have a backup team, bring those responsibilities back under the backup team."

It is true that for the "small-to-medium businesses" (SMB), customers will be going to a purely 100 percent virtualized environment. In those situations, we would recommend our Backup Exec V-Ray edition, which is a dedicated solution for these types of customers.

Ultimately, to prepare, it becomes primarily a change of mindset about who ultimately owns the backup data, and more importantly, the recovery responsibility.

Jerome: So there should be just one team that owns the process?

Simon: Exactly, yes, absolutely.

Jerome: In its press release, Symantec mentioned nine points that organizations should follow to achieve this objective? Which three of these nine points should SMBs prioritize?

Simon: Number 1, if an SMB or enterprise has the resources to manage Backup Exec in-house, we have made it much easier for them. From an SMB perspective, the biggest change we have spearheaded is the radical simplification to the user interface of Backup Exec, trying to make it easier for our customer to deploy that solution and ultimately making it easier for them to manage their data protection policies and recovery strategy. Think, "easy button for backup."

Second is deployment choice. As well as our software based Backup Exec offering, Symantec offers appliances that provide a "turnkey" solution. These make data protection very simple and easy to deploy and maintain. Finally, for those looking beyond deploying a solution themselves, Backup Exec.Cloud offers customers a cloud-based choice as a deployment model.

Third on the list is what we discussed earlier, that SMBs should focus in on using one product for data protection and recovery across the complete infrastructure, physical and virtual.

Jerome: How about on the enterprise side?

Simon: I think from an enterprise perspective, uniting physical and virtual environments is definitely one of the biggest trends that we are seeing as customers moving toward greater and greater virtualization within their environments.

Over last year, and into this year, we are seeing our enterprise customers move toward virtualizing their mission-critical and business-critical applications, as well as providing management through one solution. We have not seen any customers, certainly none that I have met with, moving to 100 percent virtualized. They will still have a large physical environment, and then they could again manage that from one solution as opposed to using point solutions.

We have also seen enterprises start to move the management of snapshots from replication into the actual backups. Our partnership with NetApp, that we will be extending over time towards other storage vendors, as part of our open storage program, is key in terms of again providing one "manager of managers", one centralized management for physical, virtual, snapshots and replication.

Jerome: Can you discuss some early successes you have seen?

Simon: The reaction from the 4000+ customers we have had participate in our beta and first availability programs for our Backup Exec 2012 and NetBackup 7.5 releases has been extremely positive.

We have seen a number of successes around our physical-plus-virtual message and customers aligning to one solution, be it with Backup Exec or NetBackup.

From my focus area with NetBackup on the unification of traditional backup with snapshots and replication, it is still early, but we have had a number of customers that are already looking to deploy who are already big users of NetApp and NetBackup together. They see the benefit of streamlining on one management solution, rather than managing the two separately.

We are working very closely with NetApp in terms of bringing our replication director, the unification of snapshots, and the backup solution to the table. We know there is at least a 50 percent overlap in terms of customers that use snapshots with NetApp, and who also use NetBackup. So there is a great opportunity for customers to streamline their operations by moving to a single point management solution.

Jerome: Are you also looking to manage replication?

Simon: We are. The integration that we have manages both snapshots and replication, from when the snapshot happens, to the replica of that snapshot, any replication of that data, and also if you wanted the vaulting of that data to be written out to tape itself.

In Part 1 of my two-part blog series with Symantec's Senior Director of Product Management, Simon Jelley, we discussed how customers can achieve an 80% reduction in backup OPEX costs.

Achieve an 80% Reduction in Backup OPEX Costs; Interview with Symantec Sr Product Director Simon Jelley Part I

2012-02-27T11:00:00Z

Symantec's announcement that it intends to reduce operational expenses (OPEX) associated with backup by up to 80% over the next 3-5 years is a pretty aggressive goal. It is only when one looks at the problem areas within companies and the new features found in NetBackup 7.5 that it becomes clear that achieving these savings are within any company's reach.

Today, I start a two-part interview series with Symantec's Senior Director of Product Management, Simon Jelley, where we discuss the details on how organizations can leverage Symantec to achieve an 80% reduction in their backup and recovery OPEX costs.

Jerome: Symantec has been a leader in backup for years and the dominant player in a space with many players. But as customer environments have become more complex, so have their backup and data protection needs. To solve that problem, Symantec has taken significant steps to integrate and offer data protection as a single solution. What led to Symantec to focus on this as an initiative?

Simon: There are really two takeaways from our conversations with customers over the past few years that led us to this point. One was just the sheer complexity that customers are seeing in their environments, particularly with the onset of virtualization.

Typically customers are not protecting their environment with one solution. They usually have a few with many using at least three different data protection products.

Further, a company might have a separate solution to support an application running a database on Oracle or SQL Server, and this might be separate from their standard streaming-based backup tools like NetBackup. Then they might also add another one for virtual environments. So we are trying to help reduce the complexity of managing multiple data protection solutions and, more importantly, use one product with one management front end.

The other factor is the ongoing trend of budget pressure, and trying to do more with less. If you could cut these three or more solutions down to just one, there will ultimately be less operational cost in terms of the number of teams and the time required to manage backup. Further, this reduces the amount of training they need and they only have to go to one place to do recovery.

Jerome: In your Feb 6, 2012, press release, Symantec announced its intent to reduce the operational costs associated with backup and recovery by up to 80 percent. How did you arrive at that number?

Simon: The biggest trend driving customers into point solutions is virtualization. As we dove into this space, we saw that our customers need to protect those virtual environments and it became obvious that we needed to do a better job of making sure customers are educated that the data protection solutions they already use could protect their virtual environments as well.

Simply using their existing backup software and adopting a unified approach to data protection for their virtual environment should drive at least a 50 percent reduction in the number of people needed to support backup. We also realized that organizations could drive even more efficiencies by eliminating application-specific data protection products for the likes of Microsoft Exchange, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

Finally by adding more "self service" features to our existing data protection solutions, we could free up 60 to 70 percent of the routine work that a backup admin has to do day-to-day. These are the types of features we are moving toward implementing into NetBackup to achieve this 80 percent reduction over that three to five years.

Jerome: Are there other operating costs you are targeting, too?

Simon: There is a lot of waste in training people to manage multiple solutions. If you can get to one, it is much simpler. Reducing the number of people involved in the restore process, and the time it takes to do the restore, is definitely a key metric as well. Overall, we are looking at what is required to operate and maintain an environment.

This is why you now see turnkey solutions from Symantec like our appliances. We have also made ongoing maintenance simpler with features like "call home" and "auto update" on those appliances.

Jerome: Is there a way for customers to benchmark how much time they are spending on these functions?

Simon: Customers can certainly look at how much time they are spending on training, and then how much time they cumulatively invest in managing the multiple data protection solutions they have across their organization.

They should also evaluate how much time they spend on doing installs and updates as compared to using turnkey solutions like our appliances.

Finally, we recommend organizations examine how much time it takes, and how complex it is, to perform recoveries using multiple solutions versus how long it takes to manage and do recoveries using a single solution.

In Part 2 of my interview with Symantec Sr Director of Product Mgt, Simon Jelley, we discuss what enterprises can do today to prepare for the changes that will be driven by single-point integration in their data protection solutions.

Symantec NetBackup 7.5 Strikes Delicate Balance between Backup Acceleration, Ease of Management and OPEX Reduction

2012-02-07T11:00:00Z

Enterprise shops are like their small and midsize counterparts in that they share a similar desire to speed up and simplify backups in their respective environments. However the techniques required to meet these demands requires the use of backup software that is more sophisticated beneath the surface, easier to use and reduces operational expenses (OPEX). The enhancements found in this week's release of Symantec NetBackup 7.5 strike a good balance in accomplishing those exact objectives.

Yesterday I examined some of the new techniques that Backup Exec 2012 introduced to expedite and simplify backups for small and midsize shops to include:

Making its management interface easier to understand and navigate
Bundling its software licenses for one flat fee
Creating two distinct offerings for small businesses
A new V-Ray edition for 100% virtualized environments
A new option to recover physical servers into virtual environments

Unfortunately the backup challenges that enterprise shops face are a few magnitudes greater than what small and midsize organizations tend to encounter. So backup software intended for the enterprise has to employ even more sophisticated techniques to simplify and expedite backups in these environments without making it easier for enterprises to take advantage of them. This is exactly what this week's enhancements to NetBackup 7.5 provide.

NetBackup backup acceleration. Symantec's Senior Product Marketing Manager, Danny Milrad, summed it up pretty well when he described the feedback that Symantec is getting from customers about their struggles with backup. He says, "They have service level agreements (SLAs) that they do not have a snowball's chance in hell of meeting due to the volume and size of data that they have to manage."

This is why many enterprise backup administrators should welcome with open arms the new NetBackup Accelerator feature. Symantec aggregated multiple features from its existing portfolio of intellectual property to create NetBackup Accelerator, which delivers backup speeds that are up to 100x faster than today's backups.

To accomplish this, NetBackup Accelerator first looks at changed log files on the initial backup run as well as only scans file systems that have changed files. To know which ones do and do not have changed files, NetBackup will now remain in regular contact with file systems between backups.

Then, as the time for the next backup approaches, NetBackup has a pretty good idea of which files have changed since the prior backup. To optimize the backup job, it deduplicates the data to ensure that blocks of data being sent are not transmitted multiple times.

Symantec already found NetBackup Accelerator to deliver when it tested it internally. It ran a 61 GB, 500,000 file backup from its Roseville, MN, to its Beijing, China, data center and found that the time to complete the backup went from about four (4) hours to under two (2) minutes.

NetBackup adds NetApp Snapshot™ to its list of supported array snapshot features. NetBackup's ability to manage storage array snapshots and do recoveries is in and of itself nothing new. NetBackup has done that for years. But new in NetBackup 7.5 are the storage array snapshots that NetBackup supports and how it manages these snapshots.

The big addition to NetBackup's already extensive support for storage array snapshots is its new support for the Snapshot feature found on NetApp FAS storage arrays. Two items make NetBackup's support and integration with the NetApp Snapshot feature noteworthy.

First, since NetApp uses its Data ONTAP OS across all of its FAS storage arrays from its enterprise FAS6200 series down to entry level FAS2000 series, enterprises may now manage NetApp snapshots on any of these arrays using NetBackup. Second, and maybe more significantly, it moves the management of the snapshots and the recovery of the data within the snapshots to the backup admin.

One of the challenges associated with using snapshots on storage arrays is that without backup software integration, the storage admin is left to setup snapshots and then also manage recoveries. In the case of shops that use NetApp, this can become particularly problematic as it is estimated up to 50% of NetApp customers use its Snapshot feature. This caused some overlapping of responsibilities between backup and storage administrators in these shops.

Adding NetApp to NetBackup's list of supported array snapshots brings back into alignment the more natural break in responsibilities between these administrators. Further, the integration between NetBackup and NetApp extends well beyond just simple management of NetApp array snapshots.

For instance, NBU 7.5 will immediately enable administrators to do recoveries from NetApp snapshots down to the file level. As Symantec finds that 90% of restore requests are for single file recoveries, due to NetBackup's integration with the NetApp Snapshot feature, it will have knowledge of NetApp file system down to the file names and their attributes. Now backup admins may restore a single file through NetBackup from the NetApp snapshot without requiring a storage admin to get involved.

Expansion of NetBackup's integration with OpsCenter. Reducing the operational costs associated with backup and recovery by up to 80% over the next 3-5 years is one of Symantec's top priorities. Making that a reality means making all functions associated with backup and restore much easier to accomplish though in NetBackup 7.5, restore gets attention in particular.

Doing individual file restores from NetApp snapshots hints at broader initiative under way at Symantec. Symantec's ultimate objective is to make restores so simple that the responsibility for doing them may move from backup administrators to first line support staff.

In anticipation of this move, NetBackup integrates with Symantec's OpsCenter console so that administrators may access the OpsCenter console and perform a number of tasks. These include searching for data that is subject to an eDiscovery or locating a particular file and then restoring it to the correct location.

Over the longer term enterprises should envision the OpsCenter console becoming both more expansive and more powerful as it starts to assume tasks that administrators perform now. As these are assumed by OpsCenter, expect first line support staff to leverage it to eventually assume more responsibilities currently done by backup administrators.

The level of sophistication needed in today's enterprise backup software products is only matched by the demands placed on backup software providers by enterprise to make their products easier to implement and manage. NetBackup 7.5 strikes a pretty good balance in delivering on those objectives in this release.

The introduction of NetBackup Accelerator coupled with NetBackup 7.5's new support for NetApp FAS storage systems provides the new backup and recovery speeds that today's enterprises seek. However by also enhancing NetBackup 7.5's integration with OpsCenter, enterprises begin to immediately reduce some of their OPEX expenses associated with backup and recovery and should anticipate much greater reductions in OPEX costs in the years to come.

Universal Desire for Better Backups Provides Impetus for New Features in Backup Exec 2012

2012-02-06T13:00:00Z

The differences between small, midsize and large organizations may be many but when it comes to backup, they all seem to share one thing in common: a desire to speed up and simplify their backups. The challenge is that for each of these organizations to accomplish this they need to take different paths to do so. This universal desire for better ways to do backup was the impetus behind many of enhancements found in today's announcements of Symantec Backup Exec 2012 and NetBackup 7.5 (though I will be covering the new NetBackup features in a separate blog entry tomorrow.)

The concerns that Symantec heard expressed from both current and prospective customers regardless of their size about their respective backup challenges are remarkably similar. These include:

Much of their data is protected in silos
They miss their backup windows some or all of the time
They treat physical and virtual backups separately
They use multiple products to protect their physical and virtual environments
Recovering data and doing disaster recoveries become more difficult in this environment

So while their backup concerns are the same, the ways that these organizations need to go about addressing them will vary according to how small or large they are. This is why Symantec today introduced different techniques for doing exactly that in its new Backup Exec 2012 and NetBackup 7.5 releases.

Backup Exec is targeted at small and midsize organizations so the new functionality introduced into Backup Exec 2012 reflect the specific concerns of these size organizations. One step that Symantec took was to revamp Backup Exec 2012's interface so it takes less time for these users to get Backup Exec up and running in their environment. Then, once they are using Backup Exec, Symantec made it easier to backup more complex configurations.

For example, Backup Exec now discovers the servers in the environment and provides administrators with the ability to do at-a-glance assessments of their environment. So by just checking the Backup Exec console, they may quickly determine which servers are backed up, where backups failed and which ones have never been backed up.

Another step that Symantec took in Backup Exec 2012 was to simplify its approach to licensing for small businesses. In the past, they may have had to go back and obtain a license to backup Microsoft Exchange, then another to backup SQL Server and then yet another to backup some other application. In Backup Exec 2012, they pay one price and get a bundle of licenses with it for these applications.

A third step that Symantec took with Backup Exec 2012 was to break it into two distinct offerings for small businesses. The Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition is the on-premise version of the software that includes a bundle of licenses that they need to protect their environment.

Backup Exec.cloud is the web-based version of the product. In this implementation, there is no local backup server or data stored locally. Instead, the backup server is located in the cloud and accessed via a web-interface with all data directly backed up to and recovered from the cloud.

Small businesses trying to decide between the two will need to assess how much data they need to backup and how robust their WAN connection is. However if they are only protecting a few hundred GBs of data (and maybe up to 1 TB,) Backup Exec.cloud may be a viable option for them. Otherwise Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition is probably the better choice.

A fourth new feature that Symantec introduces in Backup Exec 2012 is a new V-Ray edition that is entirely focused on virtualized environments. One of the big trends is a growing number of SMBs jumping on the virtualization bandwagon and virtualizing their entire server environment. As they do, they only need backup software specifically designed for virtual environments.

The V-Ray edition of Backup Exec 2012 does exactly that. It is intended for environments that have 100% virtual workloads and can support either a VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V environment.

The final major feature that Backup Exec 2012 introduces is "no hardware disaster recovery." The new flexibility this gives organizations is the opportunity to take a backup of a physical machine and convert that backup into a recoverable virtual image so organizations can now recover physical machines in virtual environments as easily as they can recover their virtual ones.

Since Backup Exec 2012 gives users the option to recover to either Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere environments, this feature potentially has application well beyond just DR. For example, users may now leverage this feature to explore migrating existing physical applications to virtual environments or bring up physical applications in virtual environments for testing and other purposes.

Overall a nice bundle of features in Backup Exec 2012 though I personally find the V-Ray edition and the physical recovery in virtual environments the two most compelling ones that users will find the most beneficial over time. Since NetBackup 7.5 had as many new features as Backup Exec 2012, I will devote another blog entry tomorrow to discussing the new features in that release.

Symantec's Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows Further Helps Level Hypervisor Playing Field

2011-11-16T14:00:00Z

If there is anything that businesses deplore is a lack of choice and, right now, a perception exists that VMware vSphere is their only hypervisor choice due to some features that vSphere offers that Microsoft Hyper-V does not. However this gap in hypervisor feature functionality closed further with this week's release from Symantec Corporation of Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows. Using it in conjunction with Microsoft Hyper-V, businesses and organizations can now get some of the same type of hypervisor benefits from Microsoft Hyper-V that VMware vSphere offers and even some new ones that vSphere does not.

In a recent blog entry I commented how the statistics surrounding the adoption rate and growth of VMware within businesses over the last few years are staggering. Consider that over 19,000 customers, partners, press and analysts attended its recent 2011 VMworld conference in Las Vegas and that a new VM is created somewhere in the world every 6 seconds.

Despite VMware's growth, businesses still appear to be leery about betting the future of their data on a single hypervisor platform. It was only last week when I was in attendance at the HDS Influencer Summit that HDS shared that all of its enterprise accounts have multiple hypervisors running in their environments. Anecdotal evidence like this would seem to suggest that while VMware has a significant head start in hypervisor adoption businesses are still keeping their hypervisor options open.

This willingness of businesses to look for hypervisor alternatives to VMware vSphere gives some insight into the impetus behind some of the new features announced in the Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows, which includes Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0 for Windows for storage management solutions and Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 for Windows for high availability/disaster recovery solutions, today.

While all of these features may not be directly targeted at helping to equalize the playing field between Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere 5.0, the argument can certainly be made that these new features in Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows go a long way in making that happen. Consider:

Faster detection of failures. Previously in clustered Windows environments, a polling-based monitoring mechanism was used to detect for application failures. Using Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows, organizations now have access to its Intelligent Monitoring Framework (IMF) that integrates with the Windows operating system so Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 automatically receives alerts about application failures. This proactive approach to receiving information as the alerts are generated as opposed to periodically polling for these alerts enables Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows to more quickly detect failures in Windows and Hyper-V environments.

Faster failovers. Once a process failure is detected, Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows also introduces its new Multi-node Disk Group Access feature, which is a shared volume manager, to accelerate failover recovery. Previously for a failover to occur, the failover server would have access to the production server's disk group but it would still need to import the disk group and rescan the disks in it that could take minutes or even hours to complete.

Using Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows, both the production and the failover server continue to have access to the same disk group though they both now have Read-Only access to the disk group(s). Now the only thing that changes during a failover is which server has Read-Write permission.

During a failover, that switching from the production server to the failover server and eliminates the need for the failover server to import disk groups and rescan the disks. This change reduces the time for application failovers to occur in as fast as a minute or less. Further, since Hyper-V is a part of Windows, this failover capabilities is extended to every VM hosted by Hyper-V.

Automated disaster recovery across any distance. Microsoft Failover Cluster already provides high availability and live migration for Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs) but only at a single site. Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 for Windows extends these native abilities found in Microsoft Failover Cluster across any distance.

Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 for Windows integrates with hardware replication technology, and then Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 performs the end-to-end recovery automation of Hyper-V virtual machines at the disaster recovery site. Then should a recovery of either a physical or virtual machine at the second site be required, Veritas Cluster Server 6.0 for Windows automates the recovery of the applications at the other site by working in conjunction with Microsoft Failover Cluster.

Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows introduces these new features for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Hyper-V by extending and integrating storage management and high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) solutions across any virtual platform (Hyper-V, VMware, KVM, etc) and any physical platform (Windows, Linux, Unix).

This gives some inkling into how Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows helps to close a specific feature functionality gap that now exists between Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere. Both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere natively provide the ability to failover VMs from one physical machine to another with Microsoft using its Live Migration feature to perform this function while VMware uses its vMotion feature.

However, of the two hypervisors, only VMware vSphere 5.0 currently offers the ability to do Storage vMotion. Using Storage vMotion, vSphere leaves the VM and its applications running on the same physical machine while Storage vMotion transparently moves the VM's disk file from one backend storage array to another. This technique minimizes or even eliminates the need to take VMs offline when backend storage arrays are taken offline for maintenance or storage upgrades. As of right now, Microsoft Hyper-V offers no such functionality.

Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows enables Microsoft Hyper-V to overcome this existing limitation. Using Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0 for Windows in a Hyper-V environment, organizations can now create a volume on one supported storage array and then mirror that volume to a second supported storage array.

This new functionality, known as Hyper-V Online Storage Migration, enables organizations to now run VMs on Hyper-V and use Storage Foundation 6.0 for Window's Online Storage Migration capability to transparently move a VM's virtual disks from one storage array to another to accommodate moving to either higher tier or lower tier storage or performing storage array maintenance, without needing to take the VM offline to do so.

VMware vSphere has gotten a great deal of momentum among businesses over the last few years but as some storage hardware providers are pointing out, their enterprise customers are still keeping their hypervisor options open. The Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0 for Windows gives them further reason to do so. By bringing Storage vMotion-like features to Microsoft Hyper-v with its Hyper-V Online Storage Migration feature and additional faster detection of failures, faster failover and disaster recovery across any distance features, Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 for Windows does more than improve Hyper-V availability and recoverability. It may have just helped to level the hypervisor playing field.

The Symantec NetBackup 5000 Series: A Backup Appliance for Today, A Comprehensive Data Protection Strategy for Tomorrow's Backup Needs

2011-11-07T11:00:00Z

Deduplicating, disk-based backup appliances are now part of almost every organization's data protection conversation. But this does not mean every organization should approach or view them in the same context. While many companies may want strictly a "backup target that does deduplication" that works with their existing backup software, there is an equally large contingent of companies that want a backup appliance that possesses features that enable them to build out a more comprehensive data protection strategy.

Deduplicating, disk-based appliances that function as backup targets have in recent years gained a reputation as being a "silver bullet" to solve the data protection challenges that many organizations face. This is certainly understandable considering that they:

Deduplicate data
Facilitate the cost-effective introduction of disk into the backup environment
Increase backup and recovery success rates
Minimize or eliminate the need to handle tapes
Shorten backup and recovery times

It is for reasons like these DCIG recently produced its inaugural 2011 Midrange Deduplication Appliance Buyer's Guide to help users understand what products are available, how they differ and then guide them in making buying decisions about the various products in this market. But what this Buyer's Guide did not profess to cover is every possible way that deduplication might be deployed on an appliance.

Instead the Buyer's Guide only evaluated appliances whose primary purpose was to function as a backup target that presented either a NAS (CIFS or NFS) or virtual tape library (VTL) interface to the backup software. Using this restricted definition, the Buyer's Guide examined products from providers like EMC Data Domain, ExaGrid Systems, Quantum and others.

However, there is a separate class of deduplicating backup appliances that do more than just function as a disk-based target with deduplication; they act as an integral component for building out a more comprehensive data protection solution that many companies want to implement. One such example is the Symantec NetBackup 5000 and 5200 series appliances which are optimized for use with both NetBackup and Backup Exec.

This tight integration enables additional deduplication capabilities and features. Source/client deduplication and what Symantec refers to as "intelligent deduplication" are examples of capabilities that most traditional target-based deduplication appliances do not natively provide.

For example, the NetBackup 5000 series appliance offers source side deduplication that allows both NetBackup and Backup Exec clients to send an optimized stream with up to 99% less data directly to the appliance. Further, as clients can directly write to the appliance, the backup server is no longer in the data path of these backup streams and does not act a bottleneck to them.

A second differentiator is Symantec's deduplication software that can optimize backup streams from both NetBackup and Backup Exec media servers and clients. The deduplication engine can peer directly into the backup stream and deduplicate data at the exact file offsets for various kinds of data streams.

In this case, when a VMware backup host sends VMDK files in the data stream, the NetBackup deduplication engine in these appliances actually sees inside of the VMDK files resulting in more efficient deduplication.

Further, as data growth and power consumption are a concern even for small organizations, NFS/CIFS protocols coupled with the overhead needed to handle random access during writes are not optimal for sequential streaming pattern from backup servers or clients. By contrast, the NetBackup appliances leverages optimized features that provide faster backups without taxing the network.

NetBackup 5000 appliances provide an optimal way to introduce not just target deduplication but several other features to modernize today's backup infrastructures. Key advantages that organizations will realize by implementing NetBackup 5000 series include:

Global deduplication. NetBackup 5000 series appliances make it possible to expand the capacity of the deduplication pool by adding more NetBackup 5000 appliances to the existing pool. The deduplication pool may expand to span multiple devices that never store a deduplicated data segment more than once across the entire pool.

WAN optimized replication. Backup to disk and data deduplication do not remove the requirement for organizations to get their backup data offsite in the event of a disaster. While replicating data offsite does require a secondary location to send the data, all NetBackup 5000 series appliances include replication with no additional licensing fee required to use it.

The appliances optimize the "replication" or transfer of data by granularly replicating data within selected backup images. Further, this feature gives organizations the control to use different retention settings at the primary and secondary sites as opposed to just creating mirrored retention pools.

Fast disaster recovery. NetBackup appliances are the only devices currently available that supports NetBackup's Auto Image Replication capability which makes it possible to have Active-Active configurations for disaster recovery readiness. Now organizations can have multiple NetBackup domains at different geographical locations where each one may act as the DR site for others while also serving local clients. This feature natively found in the NetBackup 5000 series eliminates the budget required to maintain a dedicated DR infrastructure (Active-Passive configurations).

Optimized synthetic backups. NetBackup appliances take advantage of the Synthetic Backup feature found in NetBackup and take it up to the next level. A synthetic backup first creates a copy of a full backup and then applies the changes to it. The optimized synthetic backup that is part of the NetBackup 5000 Series appliances improves upon that approach.

Using this capability, organizations may continue doing incremental backups (thereby shrinking the backup window and network usage) and then, using synthetic full backups, instantly create a full image, using a data map that simply points to segments in the previous backups. This involves zero data movement, as segments are already in a deduplicated format, and enables customer to quickly recover from a full image or write a full backup to tape. .

Multi-dimensional scalability. As organizations employ deduplication in their backup strategy, they need the flexibility to scale it out in multiple ways. The NetBackup 5000 Series of appliances achieves this in three ways. First, organizations may scale out deduplication processing at either NetBackup or Backup Exec clients. Secondly, should organizations need to deploy deduplication closer to the target; they may distribute the deduplication processing to NetBackup or Backup Exec media servers. Third, the processing power, bandwidth and storage may be increased by adding more NetBackup 5000 series appliances.

License what you protect. NetBackup appliances enable organizations to align licensing to what they protect using what Symantec refers to as the 3 R's. The first "R," Retention, is about no penalty for longer retention so organizations pay no additional license fees if they store data longer. The second "R," Replication, highlights that organizations do not pay an additional software license for the replication engine or additional copies. The third "R" is Refresh. Using perpetual software licenses all software licenses are carried over to the new device lowering the cost of a hardware refresh.

It is only normal for organizations to want to resolve their existing data protection challenges by introducing disk-based deduplicating appliance into their environment. But as they do so they should be cognizant that an entirely new class of backup appliances is emerging that do much more than present a NAS or VTL target. The Symantec 5000 and 5200 series of appliances arguably represent the best of what is available of these purpose-built backup appliances.

By incorporating the best of what target-based deduplicating appliances offer and leveraging the benefit of tight integration with Symantec NetBackup and Backup Exec, organizations can do more than just deduplicate data today; they can also position themselves to address their backup needs of tomorrow.

New Primary Data Deduplication Feature in Symantec FileStore N8300 v5.7 Targets Today's VMware Deployments

2011-10-27T10:00:00Z

VMware will hit a tipping point with 2011 with VMware customers expected to cross the 50% virtualization threshold by the end of the year. But as VMware adoption accelerates, a hurdle that every organization faces as it looks to implement VMware vSphere is identifying a back-end storage system that delivers the appropriate levels of availability and performance at the right price point. Last week the new Symantec FileStore N8300 v5.7 with its new primary data deduplication feature gave organizations a glimpse into how that may be accomplished.

The statistics surrounding the adoption rate and growth of server virtualization in general and VMware specifically over the last few years are staggering. Consider:

Over 19,000 customers, partners, press and analysts attended the 2011 VMworld conference in Las Vegas
A new VM is created somewhere in the world every 6 seconds
10 million VMs existed at the end of 2010

But that does not explain why even now in late 2011 organizations are not realizing the savings that they expected server virtualization to deliver. Because even as they reduce their server costs, their storage costs - both capital and operational - are continuing to rise as they deploy external, network attached storage systems to support their growing virtualized environments.

Standing in the way of them lowering their storage costs is the lack of cost-effective, highly available, storage systems that deliver the performance and scalability that VMware requires.

The storage systems that most enterprises use today were designed well before server virtualization exploded onto the scene. So while many of these storage systems have been adapted to work with VMware, they still do not address one or more fundamental issues such as:

Cost too much on a per GB basis
Do too little to optimize storage capacity (i.e. - no primary data deduplication features)
Do not put virtualized data on the right tier of storage at the right time
Lack necessary availability and reliability features
Cannot scale easily performance and capacity
Too difficult to manage

In short, what VMware environments need is an enterprise caliber storage system whose capital and operational costs do not offset the savings that server virtualization offers. Last week's v5.7 release of the Symantec FileStore N8300 provides the additional features that storage system need to offer so organizations can begin to realize the broader cost savings that they expect VMware to deliver

Three features as specifically related to VMware that stand out in the Symantec FileStore N8300 v5.7 release include:

The introduction of primary block-level data deduplication. High levels of redundant data on VMware virtual machines (VMs) make block-level data deduplication almost a necessity in order for organizations to effectively control storage growth in these environments. However it is not so much deduplicating existing data where organizations will see the most benefit from the N8300's new data deduplication feature. Rather it is controlling storage growth as they create new VMs.

One of the challenges that every organization faces with VMware is that VMware vSphere makes it very easy to create new VMs for new applications. The downside of this ease of growing one's application environment is that each new VM requires additional storage capacity. Allocating this storage capacity for each VM now begins to eat into the savings that VMware initially provided.

This is where the N8300's new primary data deduplication feature should provide the greatest savings. Rather than allocating more storage for each new VM as it is created, the N8300 creates a clone or snapshot of a primary or "golden image" VM with the new VM pointing to the original image. Since each new VM initially only requires minimal additional storage capacity (usually a few GBs at most,) organizations can grow their VMware farm without running up their storage costs.

The FileStore N8300 v5.7 also addresses performance concerns that organizations may have about deduplicating the data on their VMs. The N8300 retains frequently accessed data in its read cache. Since the most frequently accessed files (such as operating system files) on VMs are almost always the same, it is highly probable that by the FileStore N8300 v5.7 first deduplicating and then storing frequently accessed VM data in its read cache the boot performance of VMs will show sign significant performance gains even as storage costs are reduced.

FileStore N8300 v5.7 integrates with vCenter and is VMware certified. Being on the VMware hardware certified list (HCL) is a prerequisite for any storage system to even get in the door in today's enterprise data centers. This certification the FileStore N8300 v5.7 provides day one. But just as important as the VMware certification is integration with vCenter to effectively manage the attached storage array from vCenter.

As more organizations consolidate their data centers, server and storage administrators are transitioning to become "infrastructure administrators." In this role they need to manage their entire data center from a single management console which, for many, is becoming vCenter.

The FileStore N8300 v5.7 provides this needed vCenter integration out of the box. However it does so in such a way that as each VM is created through vCenter, it capitalizes on the new data deduplication features by only allocating the additional amount of storage capacity that each VM needs to store the data that is unique to it.

This eliminates the need for administrators to first create the VM using vCenter and then login onto FileStore to allocate storage to it. Instead this VM creation and storage allocation process may now occur as a single transaction executed within vCenter. While administrators will first need to setup policies within vCenter to automate this process, the time and complexity associated with VM creation and associated storage management will be greatly reduced.

Automated failover capabilities. Having a storage system go offline has serious repercussions even without factoring VMware into the equation. But as organizations virtualize their servers and place them on an external storage system, the ramifications of that storage system going offline at any time becomes unacceptable. So to mitigate those risks, the FileStore N8300 v5.7 gives organizations the option to automate failover so organizations can recover at other sites.

Using these new automated failover functions in FileStore N8300 v5.7, organizations may configure replication jobs, users or both to failover to a secondary location and resume operations with minimal or no application interruption. Here again organizations will first need to set policies so the replication of data and automated failover occurs in accordance with their business needs. But the tools that they need to setup and manage this process are now natively included with FileStore N8300 v5.7.

Organizations of all sizes have in recent years implemented VMware but are dealing with the reality that the storage arrays on which they place their VMs are not optimized either for a cost or performance perspective for the demands that VMware vSphere puts on them. The Symantec FileStore N8300 v5.7 provides this new breed of storage system that organizations need. By adding in automated failover, primary data deduplication and vCenter integration, organizations get the application availability they need, the cost savings they seek and the ease of management that they desire in the virtualized environments that they are creating.

Symantec Enterprises Get Revolutionary Infrastructure with Evolutionary Products and Prices from Symantec Storage Foundation 6.0

2011-10-05T12:00:00Z

Enterprises have been hearing about the value and veracity of public cloud for years even as Symantec has been getting feedback on its value proposition from its public cloud customers. The message that Symantec has received is that "ripping and replacing" is not an option. Rather enterprises want and need revolutionary infrastructure with evolutionary products and prices.

In response to that Symantec yesterday formally unleashed a bevy of products and functionality that converts public cloud capabilities into what more enterprises want: private cloud realities. Symantec's multi-product approach delivers a revolutionary infrastructure for enterprises across the globe. To accomplish this, Symantec delivers integration, efficiency and licensing improvements with its Storage Foundation 6.0 line up of products:

Symantec Applications HA

Symantec VirtualStore

Veritas Storage Foundation

Veritas Cluster Server

Veritas Cluster File System

Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing

Veritas Operations Manager 4.1

These seven products work like RADAR to help you manage and navigate your way in to and through todays cloud based infrastructures. Traditionally, products like these were aligned in a marketing offering, but the technology afforded little integration with each other. In this Storage Foundation 6.0 release from Symantec, these seven products deliver on three core revolutionary infrastructure themes that enterprise organizations want:

Maintain resiliency

Become elastic and agile

Pool resources and meter

Symantec's unique approach to delivering this revolutionary infrastructure is rooted in its heightened focus on the capital expense budget within enterprises and tailoring the Storage Foundation 6.0 lineup to work with existing data center infrastructures. Symantec has taken these three themes and evolved them into business critical pillars for the private cloud. Symantec identifies three pillars as:

Resilient Business Services. Resilient business service is more than just language; it is holistic and orchestrated approach to HA/DR across operating systems and virtual environments. To do so in Storage Foundation 6.0 Symantec has integrated Veritas Operations Manager, Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) and Symantec ApplicationHA to achieve this goal.

These products work in tandem to tie an entire business service from server to storage, through to reporting.For example, prior to the Storage Foundation 6.0 release, Symantec customers typically had to architect HA/DR for a database and a web server separately as there was not a way to pool these resources for monitoring and management.

In this release the products are tied together to present your business critical infrastructure as a pool to make it more elastic and operate as a whole. VCS, working with ApplicationHA, figures out if the error is in the web server, database or application/business rules. Once identified, the products orchestrate an availability recovery that is both resilient and revolutionary.

Resilient elastic storage. Symantec continues to deliver on traditional storage features ranging from cluster file system to thin provisioning. However storage and data management technologies have evolved in recent years with storage deduplication and compression taking some of the focus off of eliminating data.

In response, Symantec focused on delivering deduplication and compression as a core part of their resilient elastic storage so enterprises can create private cloud that expand, reduce, deduplicate, compress, optimize and chargeback across multiple vendor storage.

Deduplication can be enabled on a per-file-system basis and works by identifying duplicate blocks. Once the duplicate blocks are identified, they are mapped to the same inode. In pre-release testing Symantec was able to deduplicate virtual machine storage at a rate of 50% with the ability to achieve deduplication ratios of upward of 80%.

Compression can also be enabled on a per-file-system basis or specific files and/or directories but also makes provisions to exclude certain file types that are crucial for compression such as JPG, tar.gz, and ZIP files

To prevent compression and deduplication workloads from conflicting with production workloads, Symantec took two important steps. First, it configured them to operate as post process optimizations. Second, it separated these optimization workloads from production workloads.

Yet what is arguably most valuable is that Symantec delivers these elastic storage capabilities for your existing storage as well as any new storage you purchase. Utilizing their storage efficiency technologies enterprises can minimize the need for future purchases plus Symantec provides chargeback reports to justify the budget for these new purchases and identify those who should help pay for it.

Information to action. Resilient business services and elastic storage generate a lot of information about whole systems and infrastructure operational efficiency. To accommodate this data growth Symantec extended its Veritas Operations Manager with Veritas Operations Manager Advanced. The advanced version integrates Operations Manager's reporting capabilities with the remediation capabilities of other Symantec products.

For example, say a volume is over subscribed. In this release administrators only need to do a left mouse click and chose from "Options." Options include resizing, restore, snapshot, mirror, etc and so they can execute a resize and convert it to a thinly provisioned volume all from this new unified Operations Manager.

Revolutionary technology at evolutionary prices

Unifying the Operations Manager does come at a price, but Symantec has taken this in to consideration as well. Symantec's Chandra Rangan, says, "Symantec Storage Foundation 6.0 introduces a new pricing model based on actual core usage."

What this means in layman's terms is that an enterprise will only pay for the software it is using. So as an enterprise's operational needs increase, it can upgrade or downgrade its software licensing accordingly. Operations Manager includes improvements to help manage the new software licenses and track inventory.

Symantec products are a great choice for resilient business services infrastructure as it addresses these three key business goals:

Leverage your existing capital expense infrastructure

High availability in an orchestrated manner for business applications

Operate elastically, expand or contract your expenses like a Cloud

So while these are evolutionary in nature and were formally announced yesterday, on December 5^th, 2011, when Storage Foundation 6.0 is generally available, the revolution in your data center may begin.

Structured and Unstructured Content Trump Email as the New Primary Information Sources for eDiscovery

2011-09-19T12:00:00Z

Email is certainly not "out" as an information source when it comes to doing eDiscovery but structured and unstructured content are definitely "in" as the new primary information sources that global companies access when responding to an eDiscovery request. That is just one of the conclusions reached in Symantec's 2011 Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey announced today that was based on feedback from 2,000 global enterprises and released today. But even as companies change what internal information sources they access during eDiscovery requests, many remain ill-equipped to deal with it.

In May and June of this year Symantec engaged Applied Research to poll a list of advisory group members known to Symantec who consisted of equal parts technology and legal professionals. All of these individuals work for companies that employ at least one thousand people and are themselves involved in some way with responding to eDiscovery requests on behalf of their company.

Based on the survey results it is clear that global companies are responding to a growing number of eDiscovery requests. In answering the question as to how many times in the past year that their company had to respond to a legal, compliance or regulatory request for electronically stored information (ESI), companies on average had to deal with about 64 requests for ESI annually.

However the source of where they internally had to go to access this information was no longer primarily in the email archives. While email was still requested 58% of the time in conjunction with a legal, compliance or regulatory request for electronically stored information, 67% of the requests were now for information residing in business applications and files and documents as opposed to email.

This swing toward alternative sources for information internally within these global organizations reflects the broader changes that are occurring in society as a whole. Email is still clearly a leading way that people use to communicate and share information but texting, instant messaging and social media are supplanting email in many of these organizations. Further, as organizations continue to store more information in structured forms such as data warehouses as well as in shared network repositories or even the cloud, limiting eDiscovery to just email is just, well, too limiting.

It is for these reasons that when in speaking Dean Gonsowski, Symantec's Associate General Counsel and Vice President (eDiscovery Services), he commented, "Companies can't afford to ignore any one specific sector of ESI anymore. This survey shows that every company has to deal with a heterogeneous ESI mix."

eDiscovery identification, collection and preservation are typically the first few avenues that a company executes on when handling a legal, compliance or regulatory issue. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model defines them as:

Identification: "...identify and validate potentially relevant ESI sources including people and systems."
Collection: "...methodology for acquiring ESI in litigation matters, governmental inquiries, and internal investigations in a legally defensible manner."
Preserve: "...promptly isolate and protect potentially relevant data in ways that are: legally defensible; reasonable; proportionate; efficient; auditable; broad but tailored; mitigate risks."

Yet before a company may enter any of these eDiscovery phases they should already practice some form of information management that enables them to effectively and actionably manage data from creation to cremation. It is in this area that the survey reveals a gap between top and lower tier companies.

Companies that employ best practices handle eDiscovery requests 64% faster than those that do not have an information management practice in place. In addition, they realize other practical and financial benefits from having such practices in place. For instance, this survey also found that these companies:

Were 78% less likely to be sanctioned by the judicial system. If companies are sanctioned, this can lead to financial losses as is mentioned in an ABA Journal article from January 2011.
Reduced labor costs by 65%. Companies with no information management plan spent approximately 66 hours doing eDiscovery collection from backups per request. Considering that the average annual salary of a system administrator is $60,000, companies without an information management plan can incur $165,000 annually in labor costs.

These results should not lead companies that do not have formal information management plans in place to despair but neither should they bury their heads in the sand. There are four actions they can take now to minimize labor costs, improve how they respond to requests for information residing in business and social networks and decrease their losses due to sanctions and IT work. These are

Use backup for recovery and not as an archive.
Create a separate archive that is accessed during an eDiscovery request.
Archive business process management applications and social network activity along with emails
Introduce an information management and electronic discovery plan

This survey reveals that more has changed than just where organizations are accessing information during eDiscovery requests. At a deeper level, it reveals that organizations have fundamentally changed how they are communicating and sharing information and while this change does not obviate the need to access and search emails as part of the eDiscovery process, it certainly creates a new need for these organizations to put in place solutions that reach further into their enterprise than ever before.

Backup Exec 3600 Exemplifies What a 'Plug-n-Play' Backup Solution for SMB Environments Should Look Like

2011-08-30T12:00:00Z

The idea that a company - any company - can just "plug-in" a backup solution into their virtual environment and expect it to work sounds far-fetched to any IT administrator accustomed to setting up and configuring backup software. But as more companies move from measuring their IT administrators by how effectively they setup new software to how effectively they manage their virtual machines (VMs), backup solutions by necessity are shifting to 'plug-n-play.' As that transition occurs, Symantec's Backup Exec 3600 exemplifies what enterprises should expect from this emerging class of 'plug-n-play' backup solutions.

It probably shocked many observers of the IT industry when Symantec announced early this year it was going to start making its software solutions available on a hardware appliance. But as I wrote a few months ago when discussing why this is necessary, IT administrators are being asked to manage more and more VMs. As a result they have less time to do the work associated with setting up and installing applications like backup software.

But just because backup software is available as a hardware appliance does not necessarily mean that it is 'plug-n-play' in enterprise environments. There are a whole host of other factors that IT administrators must consider before they can conclude that it will work in their environments. For example, they typically manage environments that are:

Both physical and virtual. As such, any 'plug-n-play' backup solution they deploy must account for both.
Becoming increasing virtual. Despite today's mix of physical and virtual, the trend is definitely toward a fully virtualized environment especially among SMBs. Gartner predicts that by 2012 75% of SMBs will be fully virtualized. As such, these IT administrators want to manage their backup software from the same console where they manage the rest of their infrastructure, the VMware vCenter Server.
Growing. The ease of creating new VMs tends to result in VM sprawl. As such they need backup software with favorable licensing terms and that can deduplicate the backup data of these VMs.
Intolerant of application downtime and backup failures. There is a term that describes backup and recovery success rates that hover in the 60 - 80% range: failure. IT administrators have to assume and possess the confidence that both backups and recoveries will succeed in a time frame that meets the requirements of the business.

This is what the Backup Exec 3600 delivers for today's virtual environments. Since the 3600 includes Backup Exec 2010, support for both physical and virtual environments is included by default.

In recent years Backup Exec has also put increasing attention on integration with VMware environments. As such, the 3600 now includes a plug-in so it can be managed from the VMware vCenter Server.

This plug-in resides directly on the vCenter Server and creates a tab that says "Backup Exec." That tab displays what systems are protected, unprotected, supports the creation of backup policies and permits deeper dives into what backup jobs are running and their current completion status.

The Backup Exec 3600 also includes a new "recovery ready" feature that was announced today and which can also be administered using Backup Exec's vCenter plugin. Now from the vCenter console, IT administrators can test the recoverability of specific virtual machines and validate the "recovery readiness" of a specific VM.

As the 3600 backs up all VMs to its internal disk, this gives IT administrators a high level of confidence that backups are completing successfully. It also makes it possible for them to recover any VM that the IT administrator selects on the 3600 and simulate an application recovery since the Backup Exec 3600 now includes Symantec's ApplicationHA software. In this way IT administrators can be confident that the application residing on the backed up VM is recoverable and, if for some reason it is not, initiate another backup of the VM so a recoverable copy does exist.

Finally, to address those virtual environments where growth is prone to occurring at a more rapid and unpredictable pace, the 3600 offers all of Backup Exec's features - be it deduplication at either the client or media server level, agents for whatever virtual server OS (VMware vSphere or Microsoft HyperV) or physical server OS they are using or any of the other software features that Backup Exec offers.

So in this respect, the 3600 provides IT administrators the assurance that whatever they have to backup, they don't need to first check to see if they own the license to back it up. Rather the only question they have to ask themselves is, "Do they want the 3600 SKU with 1 year of support or 3 years?"

Virtual environments are putting unprecedented demands on the time of IT administrators which is requiring them to deploy solutions that enable them to more effectively and efficiently manage more VMs. But not just any solution will do because while the transition to a fully virtualized environment is occurring, it is not yet complete and may never completely happen.

It is these IT shops that need solutions like the Backup Exec 3600. It gives them the confidence that they can protect both their physical and virtual environments, is well on its way to being fully integrated with VMware so they can manage it and provides them the assurance that whatever backup or recovery feature they might need or additional VM they might have to back up, all they have to do is implement it.

Clearwell Acquisition Puts Symantec on Path toward Offering an Automated In-House E-Discovery Solution

2011-08-10T10:00:00Z

When Symantec announced in early June 2011 that it was acquiring Clearwell it was described by at least one analyst as not a shot but a cannon ball across the bow of competing archiving and e-discovery solutions. But what makes the combination of Enterprise Vault and the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform so powerful goes beyond the simple ability for enterprises to purchase these two leading products from Symantec. Rather Symantec has laid the foundation to provide enterprises an end-to-end automated in-house e-discovery solution.

Archiving and e-discovery are two disciplines that are closely linked but the linkage between the two has for the most part been a handshake agreement in terms of how they interact with each other. when doing e-discovery. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) acts as a guideline as to how the overall e-discovery process should occur.

Archiving software such as Enterprise Vault handles the Information Management, Identification, Preservation and Collection of data while e-discovery software such as the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform does some Preservation and Collection with its major thrust being on the Process, Review and Analysis of the data.

While this informal relationship has worked relatively well over the years, this is rapidly changing. Enterprise companies are:

Creating more data internally
Facing new demands to manage and retain data that resides on internal and external social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs
Having to retain and manage their data to comply with an increasing number of regulations
Seeing a continuing growth in litigation from internal and external sources

These factors put a strain on the hand-off of data from archiving software to e-discovery software. While archiving is a cost-effective way to store and retain data, just handing off an archival data store to the e-discovery software without any insight as to what information the data store contains has a number of drawbacks such as:

It may take hours, days or even weeks to search the archival data store for relevant information. A terabyte of data may only contain a few gigabytes of information that is pertinent to a specific case. While a TB may not take a long time to process, Symantec is regularly encountering enterprise clients that have petabytes of data which can take a long time for e-discovery software to process, review and analyze.
Delays or incomplete information inhibit the ability for enterprises to make business decisions. Enterprise companies want to know whether or not there is a smoking gun in their data stores. So if the data shows they are guilty, they can look to settle or, if it reveals they are innocent, they can litigate/fight back. But it is the not knowing or waiting so long to get the needed information that results in companies having to make guesses as to how to best proceed that drives them crazy.
Ability and time to examine the information in context. Once the data store is processed by the e-discovery software, those responsible for reviewing the information need some context in which to understand the information that is presented to them. The ability of these reviewers to interpret this information in a timely and educated manner will depend heavily upon how soon the e-discovery software can produce the information, the reviewers' familiarity with the enterprise and the reviewers' own familiarity with the situation in question.

It is these last three forces that are driving a tighter marriage between archiving and e-discovery software and the demand for a solution that eliminates the arbitrary hand-off of archival data stores to e-discovery software. The amount of data, the costs associated with processing large amounts of data in short periods of time and the risks associated with not knowing what information is contained in the archival data store have made hand-offs increasingly unacceptable. What is needed in its stead is a solution that ties these two pieces together so enterprises can have their archival data stores but also have the information that they need at their fingertips when they need it.

This is why Symantec's acquisition of Clearwell and its E-Discovery Platform is more than a nice complement to Enterprise Vault. In the immediate near term Clearwell affords enterprises the option to review and ready their Enterprise Vault data stores for any present or looming e-discoveries. But longer term it sets the stage for Symantec to integrate the functionality of both of these platforms so they can function as one and offer enterprises the automated, in-house e-discovery solution that today's enterprise business environments increasingly demand.

Plug-ins for Social Media Portals Abound in Enterprise Vault 10.0

2011-08-03T12:00:00Z

The shift from the Internet being a medium that enterprises use for news and information to one that they actively participate in is in full swing. But as enterprises embrace Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, they are facing new requirements to plug into these social media portals to access the content stored there and even control what their employees do while participating in these forums. So to give organizations the flexibility they need, Enterprise Vault 10.0 this week introduced a multitude of options from which enterprises can choose to monitor, control and/or archive content that their employees place there.

The impact that social media is having on enterprises was brought more clearly into view about two weeks ago. At that time Symantec released a Social Media Flash Poll that found that 42% of companies with more than 1000 employees now regularly use social media for business. It is as enterprises move more aggressively toward adopting social media that they are also experiencing some of its downsides.

For example, the typical company experienced nine public social media incidents over the past year with 94% suffering some type of negative consequence to include damage to their reputation, loss of customer trust, data loss or lost revenue. The net cost of these social media incidents amounted to about $4 million per company in the past year. Further, Gartner forecasts that by 2013 50% of all companies will have been asked to produce material from social media websites for eDiscovery.

Some may have to produce it sooner than others. Recent FINRA amendments and new FINRA recommendations state that every firm that intends to communicate, or permit its associated persons to communicate, through social media sites must first ensure that it can retain records of those communications as required by SEC Rules 17-3 and 17a-4 and NASD Rule 3110.

How well enterprise organizations respond to requests for content stored in social media sites will depend heavily upon what type of infrastructure they have put in place to support it. Further complicating the situation, they may need varying degrees of integration with each social media portal that depends on whether they need to just archive the data that their employees post there or if they actually need to set policies that control what they can say and do while engaging with these sites.

It is these specific social media concerns that Enterprise Vault 10.0 now addresses. However rather than Symantec trying to build the specific social media connectors at this early stage of the social media game, it has opted to build an ecosystem with partners who can provide Symantec clients the appropriate levels of integration and support that they need.

The press release that Symantec put out this week lists some of its partners in this new ecosystem which includes Actiance, CommonDesk, Globanet, Hanzo Archives and Socialware. But the reason for Symantec creating this network of partners at this juncture has a great deal to do with the varying levels of integration that each of these products offers with the different social media portals.

For example, some of these products only monitor, collect and archive data from various social media portals. In the case of Hanzo Archives, it captures all of the information as a work file. It then sends Enterprise Vault an email that includes an attachment with the content and all of the metadata associated with it.

Enterprise Vault then ingests that email so the individual using its Discovery Accelerator feature can see all of the relevant data contained in the email. Hanzo even includes links in the email that it sends to Enterprise Vault. So if a reviewer sees something of interest in the social content captured by Hanzo, the reviewer can click on that link and browse all of the links as they were on the day of capture.

Other packages such as those from Actiance, Globanet and Socialware go beyond just monitoring, collecting, and capturing information and give organizations the ability to set policies and control what their employees do while participating in these social media portals. Their software has API integration with these social media portals so organizations can control the ability of their employees to use certain features such as the "Like" feature in Facebook and either grant or restrict permission to do so.

The days when enterprise organizations just used the Internet as a source for news and information are over. But as enterprise organizations transition to social media and use the Internert in this fashion they also need to update their infrastructure to control, manage, collect and archive the data that their employees store out there. By Enterprise Vault 10.0 introducing this new partner ecosystem with hooks into about every social media portal available, they should be able to do exactly that.

Businesses See Risks but Proceeding to Immerse Themselves in Social Media Anyway

2011-07-22T12:00:00Z

"The debate is over. Social media has become the Internet." Those comments kicked off my conversation with Symantec's Director of Product Marketing, Sean Regan, as we discussed the results of a Social Media Protection Flash Poll that Symantec released yesterday. Among its many findings, social media is rapidly gaining momentum in enterprises as an accepted way to communicate even though IT is still in the early stages of making social media safe for enterprises to use.

Regan's statement may have been viewed as heresy even as recently as five years ago. But Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the newly announced Google+ are rapidly becoming the new face of how people get and share information on the Internet.

This trend has not been lost on businesses. While they were maybe just dipping their toes in the social media waters a few years ago, this survey shows they are now fully immersed in it. Of the 1,225 individuals surveyed who work in enterprises of over 1,000 employees, 42% confirmed they use social media for business related purposes with 49% accessing forums, 46% using it for professional social networking and 42% reading and/or writing blogs.

But as businesses jump into the social media waters IT is rightfully concerned about the new risks that social media presents to the business. The top worries that IT have include:

Employees will share too much or inappropriate information (46%)
Compliance with government/commercial data protection regulations (45%)
Compliance with information retention policies (45%)
There will be the loss or exposure of confidential information (41%)
Damage to brand or reputation (40%)

These are not necessarily new concerns. They surfaced when both email and instant messaging technologies gained momentum in the late 1990's and early 2000's. So it is no surprise that they reappear as another new forum for Internet communication has surfaced and, as before, these fears are justifiable.

The Flash Poll asked businesses to comment on nine different types of social media incidents that may have occurred in their organization in the past 12 months. It found that:

28% experienced some level of damaged brand or trust
27% experienced loss of customer, employee or organization data
25% attributed lost revenue to the incident

In some cases, these incidents result in a tangible impact to the bottom line. The biggest cost cited over the last year was a reduced stock price but the direct financial costs of dealing with the issue, damaged brand or trust, lost revenue and litigation all were neck-in-neck in terms of costs that social media incidents incurred.

Despite these risks, businesses are still rapidly immersing themselves in social media for three reasons.

The first reason is simple. It enables businesses to connect with other businesses and customers in ways that traditional Internet portals (web pages, Google search, etc.) simply do not permit. Both the business and the customer learn more about each other and can more quickly come to a decision if there is a fit and if it makes sense to proceed in a business transaction. That is appealing to both consumers and businesses and helps to explain why Google embedded circles in its new Google+ offering.

Second, the software tools required to protect and secure this data is very similar to what was required to protect email and instant messages. Yes, some hooks and features needed to be added into existing software to access these new social media sites to prevent data loss, archive the data and search it for eDiscovery.

But in many cases organizations already own software such as Symantec Data Loss Prevention or Enterprise Vault which already possess these features and hooks. As such organizations are not looking at net new purchases or creating entirely new processes to secure and manage this data. Instead the management of social media content can be folded into their existing processes and software.

Third, policies, processes and training to deal with the risks of social media are forthcoming. This explains in part why organizations do not appear overly concerned about its risks as ~50% of them already feel they can somewhat protect their social media data. But is also explains why only about 25% of organizations have fully implemented risk strategies for social media as these strategies are not yet fully defined.

Just as the Internet took organizations by storm in the late 1990's and changed how they do business, social media is having the same impact on organizations again. But the good news in this case is that businesses do not have to re-invent the wheel (or the technology in this case) in order to successfully implement social media or protect the information that it generates. Rather it appears they are more confident they can quickly get to the point where they are reaping the benefits that social media offers while mitigating its risks.

Data Insight Extends Data Ownership Classification Capabilities to Microsoft SharePoint

2011-07-05T10:00:00Z

Microsoft SharePoint is fast replacing network file servers as the preferred tool for information sharing and workplace collaboration within enterprises. But as that occurs, the same set of data management issues that exist on network file servers are re-surfacing in these environments. By Symantec now extending the capabilities of its Data Insight to reach into SharePoint, enterprises can be assured that they are only keeping the data that they need in SharePoint while confidently archiving, deleting or re-assigning the rest.

Sheila Childs, Research Director for Gartner's Storage Strategies and Technologies group, said last year that 70% of data is duplicate and has not been accessed in over 90 days. A subsequent report released by Symantec corroborated Gartner's finding as it uncovered that 75% of data had not been accessed in over 90 days. But what was possibly most enlightening in Symantec's report was that 56% of the total amount of data had not been accessed in over 12 months.

Understanding the reasons as to why data remains on corporate file servers for so long is what eventually led Symantec to release Data Insight for Storage over a year ago. One of the reasons that organizations cited for retaining data on network file servers as opposed to archiving or deleting it was that they could not confirm who or what owned it. So rather than risk disrupting a production application or a business process that may need that file at some point in the future, they kept it on production storage.

However network file servers are not the only area where questions over data ownership and relevance have crept in. As organizations seek to capitalize on the value of the data they have and encourage collaboration between their employees, Microsoft SharePoint is becoming the new de facto standard for many organizations.

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) estimates that 74 to 98 percent of enterprises are planning to try SharePoint. But a 2010 AIIM report that surveyed 624 AIIM members found:

One-third of these organizations have no plans as to where and where not to use SharePoint
26% reported that IT departments are driving SharePoint deployments with no input from information management professionals
Only 28% have legal discovery and legal hold policies in place that extend to SharePoint
43% have yet to bring SharePoint-stored content under their existing retention and long-term archiving policies

So what we are seeing is problems that were and still are associated with the deployment and management of enterprise network file servers creeping into enterprise SharePoint deployments. This made it a logical next step for Symantec to extend the capabilities of Data Insight to SharePoint.

One of the first anticipated use cases for Data Insight in SharePoint environments is planning data migrations from either File Servers or older versions of SharePoint to SharePoint 2010. As with any data migration, the first step is to identify what data is relevant whether its folders/shares in file servers or document libraries/sites in SharePoint and what data can be either archived, removed or kept under retention.

The data migration process also requires coordination both in terms of migration policy since the data owners are the best judge of the business value of the data as well as actual movement to mitigate business process disruption.

This is where Data Insight's automated data ownership inference and orphan data identification can save IT weeks and months of manual effort. (How Data Insight does this for file servers was discussed in a prior blog entry.)

To accomplish this in SharePoint, Data Insight relies upon native SharePoint auditing features to collect who is using what data. This data is collected by placing one Data Insight solution on each SharePoint farm which then gathers the data and sends it back to the main Data Insight repository.

Using this data, SharePoint administrators can then ascertain how much data they need to migrate from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 and then size the SharePoint 2010 repository accordingly. Administrators can also derive relationships such as data owners and stakeholders based on who has actually used the data.

Once the data is in SharePoint, organizations in many ways face challenges similar to those seen on file servers. Users leave the company and the data or entire site becomes orphaned within SharePoint. The problem is somewhat compounded with the self-service paradigm of SharePoint where end-users have flexibility to create sites/libraries but IT lacks visibility and control.

Now organizations can continue to use Data Insight to first identify this orphaned data or site in SharePoint environments in the same way they do now on network file servers and then confidently re-assign this data to other users, archive or even delete it.

Symantec Extends ApplicationHA Controls and Visibility into VMware vCenter SRM

2011-06-27T14:00:00Z

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) does many things well when it comes to automating the recovery process for virtualized environments that simultaneously eliminates the complexity of creating and testing recovery plans. But what SRM does not do is provide control of and visibility into the applications within VMs at the recovery site. That changes today as organizations now have a new option to enhance their SRM deployment with the latest release of Symantec ApplicationHA.

Those familiar with VMware vCenter SRM may already be aware and familiar with how SRM handles the recovery process for VMs. Should a failure or disruptive event occur at the primary site (site outages, storage array needs to be taken offline for maintenance, etc.) an administrator can initiate a failover to the secondary site of all of the VMs that are within an SRM Protection Group.

But when an administrator initiates a failover to the recovery site of that SRM Protection Group, SRM is not natively aware of the status of the applications within any of the VMs it just failed over to the recovery site. SRM assumes that the applications hosted by the VMs will come up normally and resume processing without any issues.

This assumption may be appropriate when failing over VMs that function as file, print or web servers. But as more organizations virtualize business critical applications like Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and others, it is not a given that these applications will automatically restart correctly at the recovery site. If anything, this is a dangerous assumption to make especially if they just had their service interrupted by a server failure or storage outage at the primary site.

So if using SRM to failover these applications to a recovery site, organizations should assume the following are NOT TRUE:

If the VM is up then the application is also up
If the application processes are up then the applications are functional
If the VM went through the proper start-up sequence then the application started correctly

Aggravating the problem, whether one takes a cursory glance or a detailed examination of the vCenter SRM console, there is almost no information as to the status of the applications on individual VMs. So if the VMware administrator sees that all of the VMs are up on the vCenter console, he could prematurely and incorrectly conclude that all of the applications hosted by these VMs are also up and operational.

It is this lack of control and visibility that today's release of Symantec ApplicationHA 5.1 SP2 addresses. ApplicationHA already provided control of and visibility into applications hosted on VMs so that administrators could check the status of applications, verify they were operational and even start or re-start processes on them. However should the application be on a VM that has failed over to another site courtesy of SRM, ApplicationHA lost visibility into the application's status and the ability to execute applications commands.

That loss of control and visibility into VMs that move with SRM failovers ends with this release of ApplicationHA. Now should an application that is hosted on a VM failover to the recovery site, ApplicationHA's visibility and control go with it. By going to the ApplicationHA tab in vCenter after the host VM boots up, the administrators may check the status of the application, verify it is operational, that application start-up processes occurred in the correct order and re-start any processes that did not come up when the VM restarted.

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SRM is a powerful tool within the VMware suite of virtualization software but organizations need to be aware of what functionality it can and cannot provide as they start to virtualize business critical applications and look to use SRM to recover them. Primarily it is important to note that SRM's primary objectives are to ensure that an application's data is ready to recover and that the VM hosting the application has successfully re-started.

By itself SRM does not have native control or visibility into the status of any of the applications on any of the VMs. ApplicationHA now gives administrators that additional control and visibility they need to have as they virtualize their business-critical applications regardless of whether these applications reside at the primary or recovery site.

Symantec V-Ray Technology Lays Foundation for Deeper Visibility into Enterprise Virtual Infrastructures

2011-06-20T10:00:00Z

Enterprises are quickly evolving to adopt and implement virtualization across their entire infrastructure for multiple reasons: improved economies of scale, improved efficiencies and better utilization of existing resources just to name a few. But as enterprises move down this path, they may sometimes feel like they are flying blind unable to see how their underlying physical resources are being used and where potential challenges lay. It is this foundational visibility into virtual as well as physical infrastructures that Symantec's recently announced V-Ray technology delivers so enterprises can start down the road of confidently managing this emerging infrastructure.

An excellent blog entry that describes the issue of virtual infrastructure visibility (or invisibility as the case may be) was recently posted on VMware's community blog site. In it the author described five issues that make visualizing and managing virtual environments difficult:

Many moving parts in each layer of the virtualization stack
Interconnectedness of resource usage
Constant change and automation in the environment
Intense, repeatable data analysis is necessary to "see" what's going on
Aligning the multiple skills, knowledge sets and IT team members

Those points pretty well summarize why virtual infrastructures are so difficult to manage and visibility by itself insufficient. Once insight into the infrastructure is achieved, enterprises still need to make sense of the information and then act on it accordingly.

While no one yet delivers all of these components, it is this foundational visibility into the virtual infrastructure that Symantec's V-Ray technology offers so enterprises can get to these next stages of analyzing their infrastructure and then managing it.

V-Ray technology is already found in part across Symantec's portfolio of software. For example, Symantec Backup Exec and NetBackup contribute to the goal of V-Ray by providing visibility into virtual machine (VM) backups with their single pass backup and granular recovery technology (GRT.)

Other backup software products first have to first backup the VM and then mount the backup image somewhere in order to access the VM image and then index the data inside it. Symantec eliminates that step by indexing the data as it is backed up so it can be recovered in a single step. So in the context of V-Ray, Backup Exec and NetBackup and their inherent "V-Ray" capabilities may now be called upon by Symantec to grant enterprises deeper insight into what data resides in their backup data stores.

No one likes to feel like they are flying blind yet enterprise data centers are being asked to deploy virtual infrastructures with limited visibility into this environment and almost no ability to analyze and manage it. Symantec recognizes that its existing software portfolio already possesses many of the features that enterprises need to deliver a complete view of their virtual and their physical infrastructures.

So by identifying which features inside of each product contribute to this view, identifying where additional capabilities are needed and then weaving them all together, Symantec can deliver to enterprises the visibility that they need across both their virtual and physical infrastructure. But maybe more importantly, Symantec is setting the stage to deliver the management and policy driven data center that they will want in the very near future.

Deduplication, HDDs and SSDs: Achieving the Right Balance in VDI Deployments

2011-06-16T13:00:00Z

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is emerging as one of the hot trends for 2011 and beyond. But successful VDI deployments, especially large ones, do not happen by accident and deduplication and solid state drives (SSDs) are now viewed as key technologies to deliver on a successful VDI deployment. The trick is identifying an appropriate and risk-averse way in which to implement these technologies without incurring some of the unpleasant side effects they can cause.

Deduplication and SSDs are becoming viewed as prerequisite technologies to ensure successful VDI deployments for two primary reasons.

There is a substantial amount of duplication of files when migrating desktops to VDI environments. This creates a need for a large amount of storage.
Booting a desktop requires reading from the disks on which its images reside. It is when multiple desktops are booted at the same time that contention occurs and performance is negatively impacted.

Deduplication and SSDs can be used in combination to tackle these VDI issues head on. Deduplication technology minimizes the storage growth associated with VDI deployments as only one instance of the duplicate data needs to be stored. Further, by storing deduplicated data on SSDs, data can be read back much more quickly plus SSDs can potentially become a cost-effective alternative to disk if less data is stored on them.

However there are other factors that come into play when deduplication and SSDs are implemented that are not always apparent that can negatively impact a VDI implementation.

Write I/O performance to SSDs is not nearly as good as read I/Os. SSD read I/O performance is measured in microseconds. So while SSD write I/O performance is still faster than writes to hard disk drives (HDDs), writes to SSDs will not deliver nearly the same performance boost as read I/Os plus write I/O performance on SSDs is known to degrade over time.
SSDs are still 10x the cost of HDDs. Even with the benefits provided by deduplication an organization may still not be able to justify completely replacing HDDs with SSDs which leads to a third problem.
Using deduplication can result in fragmentation. As new data is ingested and deduplicated, data is placed further and further apart. While fragmentation may not matter when all data is stored on SSDs, if HDDs are still used as part of the solution, this can result in reads taking longer to complete.

These issues illustrate how simply deploying deduplication and SSDs in conjunction with VDI may not be sufficient to avoid other issues that can ultimately undermine a successful VDI deployment. So what organizations need to do is select solutions that include deduplication and SSD as features but implement them in such a way that these features do not eventually become issues in VDI deployments.

Symantec VirtualStore is one such product that has taken some steps to do exactly that as VirtualStore can virtualize any tier of disk to create a storage pool for VDI implementations that can include both HDDs and SDDs as well as deduplicate data stored to them..

Virtualizing HDDs and SSD in this fashion and then deduplicating data stored on them helps to delivers the fast performance times that VDI needs during boot times when data is read while facilitating the continued use of more economical HDDs to store less frequently accessed data.

Further, engineering efforts are afoot within Symantec that will soon enable the placement of deduplicated, commonly accessed blocks of data on SSDs. This will eliminate the need to read this data from HDDs and thereby improve performance even more.

Deduplication and SSD technologies are fast becoming viewed as key technologies to leverage in enterprise VDI implementations. But the mere introduction of these technologies into VDI environments does not translate into their effective and optimized use nor should it negate the use of HDDs.

By Symantec VirtualStore taking advantage of the best of what deduplication, SSDs and HDDs have to offer and implementing these features, users can get the storage efficiency they seek, the performance they need and the economics to justify its deployment in their VDI environments.

Gap between Expected and Realized Benefits of Virtualization and the Cloud Persists

2011-06-13T13:30:00Z

The results of Applied Research's 2011 Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud Survey are in and they reveal that enterprises are approaching both of these technologies (virtualization and cloud) with a great deal of caution. The feedback from 3,700 enterprises of various sizes in 35 different countries suggests that many organizations still struggle with the capabilities, challenges, and benefits of virtual and hybrid cloud computing even as the boardroom holds the line on budgets and staffing levels.

This study which was commissioned by Symantec queried C-level executives and IT managers in these organizations about their experiences with virtualization and cloud computing. The survey asked them about their awareness, adoption, goals, challenges, and attitudes regarding the following technologies:

Server virtualization
Storage virtualization
Desktop/endpoint virtualization
Private Storage-as-a-Service
Private or hybrid cloud computing

Their responses reveal that enterprises implement these technologies in a progression that reflects the maturity of each technology in its respective market. For example, 45% of the organizations surveyed are implementing or have implemented server virtualization--the most mature of the technologies--with storage virtualization at 43% and desktop/endpoint virtualization at 41%.

Conversely, private storage-as-a-service and private hybrid cloud computing drop to 35% and 36%, respectively. Symantec's John Magee, vice president of virtualization and cloud solutions, Symantec, notes, "This points to the idea that server virtualization is kind of the leading wedge on these projects."

Enterprises are also finding it a daunting experience to deploy these technologies with in-house expertise. Therefore many are relying on third-party service providers for help with implementing them which coincides with what DCIG is hearing anecdotally from end-users. This represents a major shift within IT from a traditional IT delivery to a service-provider model.

The natural progression of implementation also reflects the discrepancies between expectations and realities of the technologies. Although expected benefits for each technology varied, some of the aggregate goals enterprises hoped to realize through their use included:

Better performance
Improved scalability
Increased disaster recovery (DR) preparedness
Reduced expenses

Enterprises generally achieved their goals with server virtualization with only an average 4% gap between anticipated and realized goals. However, expectations and outcomes for the other technologies were notably out of synch, including an average gap of 33% with storage virtualization. Magee suggested new infrastructures, operating procedures, and complexity of the virtual storage environment could be reasons behind this gap.

Other technologies displayed similar wide gaps between anticipated and realized benefits including desktop/endpoint virtualization at 26%, private storage-as-a-service at 37%, and hybrid/private cloud computing at 32%. As the survey report aptly points out, "Expectations are unlikely to be matched by reality until IT organizations gain sufficient experience with these technologies to understand their potential."

However enterprises should NOT be deterred from implementing these technologies. They simply need to set more sensible goals based on a pragmatic and thorough assessment of the technologies' capabilities and limitations.

Organizations said they are more likely to utilize virtualization and cloud technology with test and development environments initially. As they gain experience and comfort with the technologies, however, they demonstrate a greater willingness to place business-critical applications--such as HR, accounting, and ERP--in them.

The survey also revealed a disconnect between executives and IT with regard to placing applications in virtual and cloud environments. 60% of CEOs, 50% of CFOs, and 62% of CISOs were characterized as "somewhat/extremely open" to move business and mission-critical applications from physical to virtual servers because of concerns over reliability, security, and performance in spite of potential advantages such as reduced expenses.

In contrast, 74% of server groups, 70% of CIOs, and 64% of application owners were willing to adopt these technologies for business-critical applications. Successful utilization of these technologies, therefore, is contingent on all key players in the organization being more closely united in their attitudes toward them.

What may also be contributing to their willingness to adopt virtualization and the cloud is the growing availability of software and hardware designed for these environments. Products such as Symantec's ApplicationHA and VirtualStore typify these offerings as they facilitate the creation of reliable, high-performance virtualized deployments for business-critical applications. Further, as organizations gain more experience with these technologies, executives can be expected to increasingly agree with IT on virtualization and cloud computing initiatives.

This changing attitude is reflected in the survey as 59% of enterprises intend to virtualize database applications within the next 12 months. Another one-third also plan to implement virtualization within the next year for business-critical applications such as HR, accounting and ERP according to the survey report.

The future, then, for virtualization and cloud computing as essential strategies for enterprises is promising in spite of some early hiccups. The report says, "At this point it's largely a matter of when, rather than if, an organization will adopt these technologies."

So as organizations work through the kinks and gain deeper understandings of the technologies and how to best utilize each of them, expectations and results regarding performance, reliability, security, and cost savings will increasingly converge.

The report goes on to offer four key recommendations for a smooth transition to virtualization and cloud computing:

Don't operate in a silo when it comes to cloud computing. All IT departments need to be involved in planning and implementation, because all are affected by its use. For example, 80% of respondents identified improved overall agility of IT as a "somewhat/completely important" reason for originally considering storage virtualization. It is hard to imagine the goal of agility being realized unless all of IT is involved in achieving it.
Modernize your existing infrastructure. Modernize as needed by virtualizing server, storage, and networking. But don't a make a reckless leap in adoption by going from static technology directly to hybrid/private cloud without first maximizing efficiencies with existing infrastructure.
Set realistic expectations and track your results. Look past the hype in cloud computing, evaluate the technologies prudently, and set realistic expectations of their benefits.
Ensure alignment between IT and executives in virtualization and cloud initiatives. Executives have concerns over security and availability, and it's important for IT to show it can address those concerns with solutions such as ApplicationHA and VirtualStore typifying the offerings that facilitate this alignment.

With the boardroom holding the line on budgeting and staffing, IT must be able to demonstrate the value of virtualization and cloud computing to the organization. With greater experience, innovative products, IT-wide involvement, realistic goals, prudent implementation, and tracking of results, IT should find that task becoming easier all the time.

Symantec VOM Removes the Millstone of Charge Back from the Necks of Enterprise Data Centers

2011-06-08T11:00:00Z

Charge back is one of those pesky little details that every IT person hates to address as it can be painful to implement and then equally cumbersome to administer. Yet the upside of implementing it provides data centers the ability to justify their costs as well as opens the door for them to have conversations with their clients as to what additional service offerings they want.

It is this somewhat thorny and complicated issue that the latest release of Symantec Veritas Operations Manager addresses in far more detail than in the past.
Putting in place an effective charge back system requires that data center managers first have two key components in place.

Service catalog. Before data centers can charge back for the services they are offering, they first need a catalog of what services they offer and what each tier costs. Most enterprise data centers have at least two or three service tiers with larger, more complicated data centers possibly having multiple service tiers to meet the varying needs of their clients.

Transparent reporting across these service tiers. Once these tiers are defined and in place, there needs to be a central repository into which all of this data is fed so it can be aggregated, reports generated and each customer appropriately billed for the services they used.

The difficulty with these two requirements is that in order to implement them, IT usually had to put in place two different systems. Most data centers now have multiple tiers of service and probably even have some form of a service catalog in place so their clients can pick what level of service they want.

But when it comes to implementing charge back, they either have to implement a separate product to do that or they resign themselves to a combination of scripts, reports and Excel spreadsheets to bill their clients for the services they are using.

Needless to say, neither of these charge back options is optimal. A separate product may not be able to detect some of the subtleties associated today's data center technologies such as deduplication, RAID, thin provisioning and virtualization so they end up providing false readings as to how much capacity is actually being consumed. Conversely, relying a combination of home grown scripts, appliance generated reports and Excel spreadsheets for charge back can be time consuming and not convey the level of professionalism in billing that customers expect.

Delivering this service catalog and corresponding charge back functionality is now what the latest version of Symantec Veritas Operations Manager delivers. Data centers may already be using Veritas Operations Manager for some or all of their day-to-day management of their storage infrastructure so they have already accomplished one of the more difficult aspects of building out a successful charge back model - creating the underlying service catalog.

Veritas Operations Manager (VOM) improves upon what it already offers in two ways. First, it can now map new applications to the appropriate tier of storage capacity based upon VOM's pre-defined service tiers. This shortens the time that data centers have to spend provisioning storage.

While this functionality is important, its new ability to do charge back according to what service tier is assigned to each application without forcing IT staff to jump through hoops is even more critical. What makes this so appealing is that the charge back module in VOM can take advantage of VOM's awareness of the advanced features that exist in Symantec Storage Foundation.

Using this awareness, the new charge back features can more accurately report on how much storage capacity is actually used and available as it is taking advanced features like thin provisioning and deduplication into account when it does its calculations.

Charge back has been a millstone around the necks of data centers for years. They know they have to do it but it has been painful to implement and only able to provide levels of information and reporting that are questionable at best.

Symantec bringing a charge back feature into VOM solves a lot of these problems. Not only does it enable data centers to deliver charge back without jumping through a lot of hoops but it also delivers the more granular levels of reporting and advanced intelligence that today's virtualized data centers need.

Symantec NetBackup 5000 Series Answers New Enterprise Cry for 'Instant Gratification'

2011-04-13T10:00:00Z

In the past few weeks I have probably heard the phrase "instant gratification" uttered more times than I care to admit. But what is more interesting is that I have heard that phrase used more frequently in the context of deploying and supporting applications like backup software in enterprise environments. It is this changing mindset towards how enterprise organizations expect to deploy and support their applications goes a long way to explaining why Symantec opted to make its NetBackup software available as the NetBackup 5000 Series.

It was not that long ago that when anyone used phrases "instant gratification" and "enterprise application" in the same sentence, people looked at you like you were out of touch. Enterprise environments are by their very nature complex with a mix of applications, server and storage hardware and varying service level agreements (SLAs.) So if you so much as suggested that an enterprise application could be deployed in this type of environment in a turnkey fashion, the idea was summarily dismissed.

That has changed. As enterprises and their infrastructures have gotten both more complex and more virtualized, a new cry is emerging for solutions that are easier to deploy and maintain in these environments. That is easier said than done and no provider is immune from it, even companies like Symantec that offer enterprise backup software like NetBackup.

Consider the steps that enterprises typically have to take when deploying the NetBackup backup software as its purchase is usually just one step in a much longer process.

A server platform from Dell, HP, IBM or whoever needs to be procured as well as the storage (disk, tape or both) that will be used with NetBackup.
The operating system has to be installed on the server.
Finally NetBackup has to be installed and configured.

Then once in production it needs to be managed and supported. But as anyone close to enterprise organizations knows it is not the known and tested configurations that keep them up at night. Rather it is the untested and/or unproven configurations that can make support a hassle as issues can sometimes take days or even weeks to get fully resolved.

It is this twin set of problems that Symantec looks to address by offering NetBackup as its appliance-based 5000 Series solution. Packaging the NetBackup backup software as an appliance circumvents many of the normal internal corporate processes involved with a NetBackup deployment as it enables enterprises to just buy it and roll it out.

Further, most organizations that are looking to implement NetBackup are probably not looking to deploy backup software for the first time. Rather they are looking to upgrade or replace an existing backup solution. The NetBackup 5000 Series enables them to budget the money, resources and time and then, in just a few steps, purchase and deploy NetBackup into their environment.

Delivering NetBackup as the 5000 Series also alleviates thorny support issues that are outside of Symantec's control. Not all server and/or storage hardware platforms are created equal which can result in support issues that can become difficult to troubleshoot.

By deploying the NetBackup 5000 Series with a standardized and known server and storage hardware configuration, troubleshooting issues becomes more straightforward and easier to outsource. Symantec will also know exactly what hardware, operating system and even what firmware is on the 5000.

This configuration makes it possible for Symantec to more quickly recreate a customer's backup environment in its labs should the need arise. By deploying NetBackup as a preconfigured appliance, enterprises can help prevent these support issues from ever occurring in the first place and, if they do occur, Symantec is in a better position to identify and address them.

Using the phrases "instant gratification" and "enterprise environment" in the same sentence may never be completely congruent but there is definitely a movement afoot towards making that a reality.

Symantec clearly wants to be a part of this new reality. By configuring and packaging its NetBackup backup software as the 5000 Series to simplify its purchase and deployment while expediting support issues should they arise, it is clear that the time for Symantec to deliver its flagship NetBackup software as a hardware appliance has arrived.

Symantec System Recovery Empowers USB Devices with Recovery Capabilities

2011-04-05T11:00:00Z

The "cloud" appears to be the future of backup but that has not eliminated the need for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) or enterprises to perform fast, local recoveries for business critical applications. If anything, backing up to the cloud has put new pressure on some organizations to put this type of solution in place as recovering the data for these applications from the cloud can take hours or even days to complete. Those in this situation should then appreciate yesterday's newly announced ability of Symantec System Recovery to transform a USB device into a bootable Symantec System Recovery Disk device.

Backup to the cloud takes on many forms these days. It may involve backing up data in a remote or branch office to a central data center. It may be using a third party managed service provider (MSP) that either provides a cloud based storage target or the entire backup solution to include backup software and storage. In whatever way it is being used this is a trend that will in all likelihood become the predominant way the majority of companies do backup in the not too distant future.

But recovering data backed up to the cloud creates a different set of challenges for SMBs or enterprises with remote and/or branch offices, especially when it comes to doing a fast recovery of an entire application at these locations. Tens or hundreds of GBs of data may be needed to be restored in order to do a recovery which can take hours or even days over a WAN link. Further, once even the data is restored, it takes a proficient systems administrator to recover the application.

This presumes, of course, that the system to which the application is being recovered is the original hardware. That assumption cannot be automatically be made. If the underlying server or PC hardware to which the application is being restored has failed, then the application needs to be restored to another platform which adds another level of complexity.

It is for reasons like these that organizations should find Symantec System Recovery's (previously known as Backup Exec System Recovery) new ability to transform a USB device into a bootable Symantec System Recovery Disk particularly appealing as it addresses three concerns around application recovery:

It removes the need for a high speed WAN link to be in place to do a fast recovery.
It can create a recoverable image for each server and/or PC so should a server or PC fail the application it hosted can be quickly brought by booting straight from the USB device. To accomplish this server or PC firmware only needs to be reconfigured to boot from the USB port into which the USB device is plugged into so the application recovery can be initiated.
It makes recovery portable and simple. The bootable USB device can be plugged into any server or PC which enables anyone with almost any skill level to do an application recovery by following simple written or verbal instructions..

The USB device of choice for most applications will probably still need to be a USB-connected hard disk drive (HDD) as the capacity of these is still required to store all of an application's data and recover it. That said, servers or PCs with less data may find either a 32 GB (~$50) or 64 GB (~$120) USB flash drive a viable option to use as a System Recovery Disk (SRD.)

This release of Symantec System Recovery also gives organizations when doing a recovery to initially point to a previously created and standardized ISO image as the source for the SRD. This SRD can then harvest the specific drivers and settings from the ISO image that an organization may need an application to possess to successfully initiate a recovery in its environment. This feature is most applicable in large environments that have specific applications with specific driver needs.

The cloud is in all probability the future of backup but the need for fast, local application recoveries has not diminished. If anything, backup to the cloud may actually exacerbate the difficulty of quickly doing local recoveries because of the time and effort required to do fast application recoveries.

In this sense, Symantec System Recovery is the perfect complement to backup in general but cloud-based backup specifically. By creating bootable images on USB devices, it gives organizations the flexibility to backup to the cloud, the assurance that they can quickly recover an application should the unexpected ever happen and the confidence that almost anyone can successfully bring the application back online.

DCIG is paid a fee by Symantec Corp. in connection with this blog. Symantec undertakes no obligation to update, correct or modify any statements contained in this blog; these statements represent the views and opinions of DCIG only.