Symantec signs NetBackup 6.5 for Storage United

At its Vision 2007 conference the firm announces new storage management tool

Symantec has announced the next version of its Veritas NetBackup 6.5 storage application, which will form the basis of a new unified approach to storage management.

Revealed at the company’s Vision 2007 user event, the Storage United initiative is designed to provide improved disk-based backup tools; image and file level snapshots of VMWare virtual machines (VM) within a single backup process; and flexible storage capacity provisioning models for large corporations.

NetBackup 6.5 is expected to debut in late summer this year. Pricing is not yet available, but at launch it will integrate ‘sub file level’ data de-duplication (dedupe), archiving and replication in a single platform. The continuous data protection (CDP) technology recently acquired from Revivio will not be added to the product until the end of 2007, said the company.

A new OpenStorage application programming interface (API) has been jointly developed with hardware vendors to ensure that NetBackup 6.5 will be able to manage almost every intelligent disk based product currently on the market, including virtual tape libraries (VTLs).

Matt Kixmoeller, senior director of product management for the NetBackup platform, insisted that integration with these has been thoroughly tested, whilst organisations can continue to use third party dedupe, archiving, replication and CDP tools within the NetBackup 6.5 platform if they wish.

“We are evolving NetBackup 6.5 into a common management framework which extends the same benefits to disk based backups that customers previously had for tape,” he said.

The software also includes a ‘storage as a service’ option, the terms of which remain vague. It is ostensibly designed to make it easy for IT staff to ‘chargeback’ individual departments for the amount and type of capacity they use on a per terabyte basis, and deliver internal service level agreements for data access and backup/restore times.

“It lets you turn storage into a more efficient operation and deliver storage as a service that matches it more closely against the cost and performance expectations associated with IT infrastructure,” said Symantec chief executive John. W. Thompson.

“Many customers say they like to buy their storage software in the same way they buy storage hardware, which is on a capacity, per terabyte basis,” added Kris Hagermann, Symantec group president of data centre management.