Veritas is laying the foundations for a universal data management platform, with NetBackup at its centre.
The company released NetBackup 8.3 today – and don’t let the point release fool you. This is a huge update, with a slew of new features.
NetBackup customers can standardise on a single platform covering hybrid and multi-cloud environment and save money, according to Veritas, which has combined the software with the Veritas Resiliency Platform (VRP) and CloudPoint into the ‘Enterprise Data Services Platform’ (EDSP).
Deepak Mohan, EVP for the Veritas Products Organisation, said a prepped quote: “We’re extending enterprise-grade data protection and the most robust set of recovery options to every corner of our customers’ IT environments – from on-premises physical to virtual, to cloud and even to containers.”
NetBackup 8.3 includes:
- Better ransomware protection
- 2048-bit encryption and integration with third party key management systems (EKMS)
- Role-based access control (RBAC) enhancements
- Granular recovery of virtual machines with near-zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) due to Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
- Orchestrated rehearsals with zero production impact to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of recovery procedures
- Instant access for SQL Databases
- Expanded workload capabilities such as Microsoft SQL self-service
- MSDP (media Server Deduplication Node) – direct cloud tiering and data management in multiple buckets, storage tiers and cloud providers from a single node
- Image sharing in the cloud and support for Azure and S3 compatible object storage
- Object storage support for client-side deduplication for writing directly to cloud storage
- Cloud Snapshot enabling granular recovery.
There’s more. NetBackup 8.3 has cloud-native data protection for AWS, Azure and GCP. There is workload and data portability in hybrid and multi-clouds, with to-the-cloud and between-cloud storage tiers. Veritas has extended cloud-to-anywhere portability, adding Azure Stack to Azure Stack and Azure region-to-region, with push button orchestrated disaster recovery using Veritas Resiliency Platform integration.
Veritas has added storage cost optimisation with integrated management and reporting from Veritas APTARE IT analytics.
NetBackup 8.3 reduces discovery time from hours to minutes for large environments, with 50x speed-up for VMware vCenter and vCloud. There is 25 per cent faster dynamic NAS data protection via auto-discovery of resources and load balancing with the ability to restore data anywhere on any NetBackup target. This removing vendor lock-in, according to Veritas.
Check out the NetBackup 8.3 data sheet .
Comment
Veritas is a veteran enterprise backup supplier with more than 80,000 customers, and traditionally competes with the like of Commvault and Dell EMC. In common with these rivals, it is fighting a catch-up war with three groups of vendors.
Veeam and Acronis are backup vendors that have ridden the server virtualization wave. Actifio, Cohesity and Rubrik are in a second group that has pioneered secondary data management functions such as copy data management. They use backup as a data generating source for these functions.
A third group consists of vendors such as Clumio and Druva that provide backup as a service and in-cloud backup. Some venders in this category – HYCU, is an example – specialise in data protection for Nutanix and Azure.
Veritas is on the money in articulating the need for universal data management across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. The core features should include cloud protection, workload migration and disaster recovery functionality. However, this is a big ask and Veritas is in a race to deliver such a service and prevent customer erosion.
