In this second of a three-part series, DCIG Lead Analyst, Jerome Wendt, continues his discussion with Deepak Mohan, Symantec’s SVP of its Information Management Group. In this conversation, Mohan provides some specifics on how Symantec differentiates itself from competitors in the market by providing customers a full ecosystem of integrated products that encompass data protection, data management and data security. He specifically highlights some of the new product features that are resulting from synergies between Symantec’s data protection and security groups.
Jerome: As the market leader what differentiates Symantec’s data protection solutions from other vendors on the market?
Deepak Mohan: When you look at the Symantec solutions, you see a full ecosystem of products. If you just look at data protection products, there are many out there. But with Symantec, you can solve all of your data management, protection and security problems with one company. For instance, when you look at our enterprise stack, our Veritas NetBackup product is well integrated with the Veritas Storage Foundation stack so NetBackup can leverage it for snapshot functionality.
Another area for us is security and systems management. When Symantec looks at our customer’s data protection, it is not just about data protection, it is about managing and protecting the information.
Jerome: How does Symantec integrate its data protection and information security products to benefit customers?
Deepak Mohan: One of the key features that Symantec offers is protecting your data when security threats arise. Symantec security has a global intelligence network of monitors to detect security threats and determine their potential impact to your data. Since these can occur at 1:00 am in the morning, they can occur after a backup is already complete and when some newly created and unprotected data is exposed to this threat.
To address this, Symantec introduced ThreatCon policy-based data protection. Via a policy, Backup Exec and Backup Exec System Recovery can monitor ThreatCon levels as a background process. If ThreatCon levels go from green to orange or red, user-defined policies automatically kick in so Backup Exec makes more frequent backups of your system.
Since it may be a couple of hours before the network administrator is even notified about this threat and notifies the backup administrator, Backup Exec has already protected and secured your systems against data corruption or loss. I see this as a wonderful example of how Symantec’s software solutions work together to solve real customer problems.
Another example is around our open collaborative architecture. Now Backup Exec and Backup Exec System Recovery are all integrated into our systems management platform through our collaborative architecture. Now enterprises can through a single console:
- Monitor resources
- See what resources are protected and unprotected
- Deploy data protection agents to them
- Leverage this to setup policies where you may want to do physical to virtual conversions
- Take an image and convert it to a virtual image and vice versa.
If a server goes offline you can take the virtual image of that server and bring it up on a virtual machine which eases the management.
There is also a feature called workflow where you can correlate events across data protection and security systems. You can set up policies and rules that drive certain behaviors so enterprises can bring together events from data protection and security and decide what actions to take.
Finally, there are two suites – a server management suite and a desktop management suite. These suites bring together servers, desktops, security and data protection which also serves as the foundation for something Dell is shipping called the Dell Management Console. The Symantec solution plugs directly into the Dell Management Console. This integration benefits our customers by giving them full visibility into their infrastructure, a common management platform and really reduces their costs of managing their infrastructure.
In part 1 of this 3-part series, Deepak discusses some of the larger trends in data protection in 2009, how Symantec is delivering on these requirements now and what Symantec is doing to help organizations achieve these objectives.
In part 3 of this 3-part series, Deepak provides some specifics data protection and recovery gaps in different market segments, why the transition from tape to disk is going to occur gradually and why enterprise organizations need an enterprise software solution that addresses all of the needs of today’s organizations from the end-user to the data center.