Category: Symantec

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 deduplication feature gave organizations a glimpse into how that may be accomplished.

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.