Symantec adds more storage complexity, say users

At its Vision 2007 conference, storage giant comes under fire

Symantec defended its capacity-based licensing option for its forthcoming NetBackup 6.5 storage application today, after users said they were confused by the prospect and doubted whether it could save them any money.

Other Symantec customers said managing storage complexity, one of the main constructs Symantec’s Vision 2007 conference, is simply not a priority in their IT environments, where network access control and virtualisation head up the importance stakes.

Per terabyte pricing is designed to make it easier for companies to pay only for a subset of the software they use rather than buying a complete per server license or paying for individual features.

If a user regularly backs up only a certain amount of data, they pay a set fee that can be, but is not always, less than paying for a server of feature license. Symantec also previewed a demo where different per TB pricing was applied to primary, secondary and tertiary storage media.

Kris Hagermann, Symantec group president of data centre management, said the company has deliberately sought to simplify NetBackup pricing by cutting its options from 15 to just 3, and stressed that the traditional server-based pricing scheme for NetBackup 6.5 would continue to exist.

“We preserve both alternatives so customers would not worry about us pulling a fast one on them – there is no catch or hidden maths,” he said.

“In our defence, this is brand new. Nobody else in the industry is doing it and we have never done it before, but we did not roll this out without talking to a lot of customers in advance. Nothing is ever universally applauded but in our experience this has been positively received.”

“A lot of customers do stupid things with their storage architecture to save money, like optimising licensing costs but not deploying the best solution because it is cheaper to do it that way,” added Matt Kixmoeller, senior director of product management for the NetBackup platform.

Reducing complexity in storage environments is a common marketing theme for Symantec, though many customers say they already have their systems well under control and do not understand what all the fuss is about.

“I can see where Symantec is coming from but we have more important things to worry about than managing storage complexity, like network access control (NAC) and virtualisation,” said Robert Hampton, director of operations information systems at landscape architect firm ValleyCrest,

ValleyCrest is a beta customer for Symantec’s EndPoint Protection 11.0 system, codenamed ‘Hamlet’, which it will use to secure1500 user laptops and desktops, alongside Microsoft’s Network Access Protection (NAP) solution on the server side.

“We’ve been looking at NAC for a couple of years, but the interoperability problems between Cisco NAC and Microsoft NAP put us off. With Windows Server Longhorn, Microsoft says it has opened up its APIs to integrate with Cisco and other NAC players like Symantec, but it remains to be seen how it will work out,” said Hampton.