Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2003/11/05/veritas_drills_into_disk/

Veritas drills into disk with new NetBackup

Supporting cast full of protection

By Ashlee Vance

Posted in Storage, 5th November 2003 21:45 GMT

Veritas is getting down and dirty with data management, rolling out a new version of NetBackup and a host of complementary products that can scan deep into a customer's data stockpiles.

The centerpiece of Veritas' latest product dump is NetBackup 5.0. The most immediate gain customers will see over the 4.5 product is a 50 percent reduction in backup times and better restore speeds. Customers can now preform a synthetic backup that combines smaller, incremental data changes into the full backup without taking any systems down.

In addition, Veritas has added a desktop and laptop option for the NetBackup product. Admins can set a user's PC or notebook to perform automatic backups of data on the hard drive, or let users perform these backups manually on their own.

"There is tons of data out there such as a new presentation or business model that does not get backed up by the IT department today," said Brenda Zawatski, vice president of product marketing at Veritas. "Our product sets aside some cache on the hard drive and sends the backups to the server."

The NetBackup pricing for Unix, Linux and Windows systems starts at $5,000, and the Desktop/Laptop option starts at $2,500.

Veritas is also integrating a new product - Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0 - into its NetBackup and Backup Exec product lines. The Data Lifecycle Manager is meant to help customers keep up with regulatory requirements for protecting information. It lets admins set policies for how often data should be backed up, how long the data should stick around and on what types of storage systems the data should reside.

"This allows an admin to put a policy on the data that says, 'I am going to keep it around only for a certain amount of time and then either delete it or store it on a specified type of media,'" said Bob Maness, worldwide director of marketing at Veritas.

Veritas has also added in an index feature to the product that lets users search for data by file type, date of creation, who has seen or altered data and when a file was deleted. You can also search e-mails, for example, by sender, recipient, sensitivity, subject line and by vendor. Users, however, won't be able to get their hands on the lifecycle product until the first quarter of next year. At that time, Veritas will roll it out for Windows and then follow in the second half of the year with Unix and Linux releases.

If you thought the boffins at Veritas were slacking off, you would be wrong, as the company rolled out yet another product called CommandCentral Service 3.5. Once again, the product links into NetBackup and Backup Exec.

This product was formerly sold under the Service Manager brand and gives admins a portal for controlling various backup operations.

"A user can request that data be backed up every night and that certain pieces of information can be retrieved immediately or within an hour," Maness said.

The admin can then either tell the user to shove off or use the software to check whether or not the employee is approved for that kind of service and how best to store the data.

Overall, the software is meant to ensure that certain service levels can be met and helps keep track of how departments are using their storage resources. It ships with various reporting tools. The product starts at $22,000. ®