UPDATED 18:15 EDT / JANUARY 22 2014

Symantec NetBackup 7.6 recovers VMs in a hurry

With the rise of virtualization, backup and recovery took the backseat to business goals. But today, the emergence of private clouds and the explosion in unstructured information has put data protection back on the enterprise agenda.

Symantec is looking to help companies rein in their virtualized environments with the latest version of its NetBackup software, which the company announced yesterday. NetBackup 7.6 provides new features and greatly improved performance for petabyte-scale VMware deployments.

NetBackup 7.6 boots virtual machines directly from backup files instead of using primary storage, an approach that Symantec says speeds up recovery by 400 times. The release also adds support for VMware’s Changed Block Tracking (CBT) incremental backup technology to create images up to 35 times faster than the previous version; this can quickly add up for organizations running tens or even hundreds of thousands of VMs.

For NetApp customers, NetBackup 7.6 adds Replication Director for VMware, a new capability that lets admins leverage the storage vendor’s snapshotting software to protect 300 virtual machines in 300 seconds, according to Symantec. In addition, users can now back up their physical machines to the cloud for disaster recovery. “Data growth, complications from virtual machine sprawl and stagnant IT budgets have increased demand for backup solutions that protect, automate and efficiently manage data center environments,” said Edward Sharp, Vice President of Integrated Data Protection at NetApp, in a statement.

“Symantec and NetApp have a long history of partnering,” Sharp continued, “to deliver innovative solutions that solve these pressing data management challenges. The combined strengths of NetApp storage and Symantec NetBackup software enable customers to improve data protection service levels and reduce operational costs.”

A recent study from global advisory firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that improving backup and recovery, increasing server virtualization, and managing data growth will remain some of the most important priorities for IT. “ESG continues to see ‘tolerance to downtime’ shrinking, the sheer numbers of VMs per environment growing and the increasing use of snapshots in combination with (and managed by) backup systems to achieve the protection and recovery-agility that customers need,” said Jason Buffington, data protection analyst at ESG, in a statement. “ESG performed hands-on testing of NetBackup 7.6 for VMware to test Symantec’s ability to meet those customer demands–and found NetBackup to exceed expectations.”

NetBackup 7.6 can be purchased as a standalone product or with a dedicated 14TB appliance, and multi-tenant hosting options are available for cloud partners. Customers with current maintenance contracts can download the new version for free.

 

Suzanne Kattau contributed to this story.

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