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In EU, Veritas: Post-Symantec firm flogs data protection 'safety' to biz

Free, free at last and with new software to boot

Veritas has announced a major release of NetBackup, v8.0, and says it's ready to help businesses respond to the 2017 EU General Data Protection Regulations.

The firm has been spun out of Symantec, energised under new ownership and management to develop and sell its products into today's heterogeneous and hybrid on-premises/managed services/public cloud world. In Veritas's view, pre-Symantec data centres were more homogeneous and the public cloud didn't exist.

Veritas's release says: "NetBackup 8.0... provides unified protection for data in the cloud, as well as virtual and physical environments with enterprise-class scale, performance and extensive workload integration."

It supports:

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and MS Resilient Change Tracking (RCT)
  • NetBackup Accelerator for Microsoft Hyper-V – up to 100x faster VM backups
  • VMware vSphere 6.5 – individual VMDK file restores to the existing or to an alternate virtual machine
  • VMware vRealize plugin for NetBackup Self-Service
  • Virtual Appliance for Remote Office
  • NetBackup Amazon AMI – data protection for workloads running in Amazon EC2 cloud services
  • Integrated Cloud Storage Connectors – support for Azure, SoftLayer, OpenStack Swift, and SwiftStack
  • Enhanced NDMP Backup of EMC Isilon Filers – better deduplication rates, faster backups, and reduced storage

50,000ft view

After talking with Peter Grimmond, Veritas head of technology, our 50,000ft view of its product range is:

  • Data protection – backup and recovery to/from physical and virtual servers on-premises or in the cloud
  • Availability – Veritas Resiliency platform to provide workload service availability (moving on from Veritas Cluster Server and server availability)
  • Access – Velocity to furnish virtualised copy data
  • Insight – through Information Map slicing and dicing data gathered from the NetBackup catalogue

Grimmond says that the ready availability, nimbleness and affordability of public clouds is an ever-present alternative for enterprise lines of business (LOBs) to central IT services. Enterprise IT infrastructures have to provide public cloud-like availability, simplicity and speed without losing their corporate responsibilities for things like data governance, regulatory compliance and resilience. If they don't, their LOBs will go direct to the public cloud in an expansion, if not explosion, of shadow IT.

Veritas aims to help corporate IT types to pre-empt such shadow IT growth by providing better data protection, availability, access and insight through an integrated suite of products.

This sounds large enterprisy in scope but Grimmond says all sizes of organisations are facing GDPR from the EU in 2017. They will apply to any business trading in or with EU member states. EU citizens must be able to find out what information a business holds about them and institute a right to be forgotten. Businesses must be able to respond to such requests and can face significant fines if unable to do so. EU bureaucrats like to legislate with Goliath-sized penalty clubs.

So Veritas is there ready and able to sell businesses software or services through its partners to help secure the information banks needed and trawl through them to handle their storage better and respond to GDPR requests.

Virtue in integrated software suite

A main focus of the release is on future integration of NetBackup with other Veritas products, which will use catalogue metadata gathered by NetBackup as it backs up data:

  • Information Map integration provides a graphical view of backups and enable primary storage recovery
  • Integration with the Veritas Resiliency Platform to help maintain app availability across multi-platform, multi-vendor private, public and hybrid cloud environments via workload migration, failover, failback, data protection and non-disruptive recovery testing
  • Veritas Velocity will use NetBackup integration to virtualise a single copy of production data and quickly provision virtual copies – think copy data management without a separate silo

Veritas Resiliency Platform and Velocity with NetBackup 8 integration should available for purchase soon. We estimate around the first and second quarters of 2017.

We think Veritas will find a readily receptive audience inside its customer base for this move; its target market being the corporate IT infrastructure people. A second set of customers are managed service providers who could use Veritas SW to offer services to the multitude of smaller businesses that Veritas can't reach directly.

Its task is to convince its customers that the component pieces of its suite are as good as point products from other vendors and operate better together than any mix-and-match collection of competitors' products. Selling Veritas's newly buffed-up virtues is what its going to be about. ®

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