Category: Symantec

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.