By Steve Ragan Jun 14, 2007, 14:30 GMT
Symantec recently announced Storage United, a new service with the aim to help enterprise administrators address the root causes behind the growing cost and complexity of their storage environments. The Storage United platform will include Symantec's Veritas NetBackup, Command Central Storage and Enterprise Vault offerings. The company made the announcement at this years Vision 2007 conference.
“Storage United is about uniting platforms, administration and storage requirements across the business environment,” said John Thompson Symantec CEO. Enterprises of all sizes and across all industry segments continue to face daunting storage challenges, Symantec said. The company estimates that data volumes are doubling every two years, yet industry-average storage utilization rates remain at thirty to thirty-five percent. This makes for vast amounts of duplicate data that is filling up expensive storage systems and IT organizations are increasingly aware that storage plays a significant role in creating the space, power and cooling problems that have pushed many data centers to their breaking points.
Storage United also aims to address the cross-platform issues that are often seen with massive storage operations. Businesses typically run different operating systems each with their own management tools, causing no end of logistic nightmares for IT administrators. Symantec will use Storage United to provide organizations with a consistent view of the state of their storage capacity regardless of operating systems and platforms, Thompson explained during his address.
“Storage continues to grow at an alarming rate while available floor space, power and cooling, budget and skilled staff are becoming troublingly scarce,” said Laura DuBois, research director at IDC. “Enterprises need a practical path for getting a handle on these increasingly difficult storage environments while also controlling costs and improving service levels.”
Thompson also announced that Storage United would take advantage of NetBackup 6.5. NetBackup 6.5 introduces a slew of new features including native disk-based backup, data deduplication, integration with intelligent backup appliances and VTLs, heterogeneous snapshot management, granular recovery for critical applications and virtual machines, and new licensing and pricing programs.
“Our goal is to maximize IT resources and reduce costs while improving performance. As part of our initiatives, we increasingly leverage disk in our backup environments and Veritas NetBackup provides us with a single, integrated platform for disk-based protection and data deduplication,” said Brian Glowacki vice president, lead architect, JPMorgan Chase Global Storage Technology.
The growing popularity of virtual machines gives way to the challenges associated with backing up those environments. Offering a fix for those problems NetBackup 6.5 includes VMware protection, providing consolidated backup, granular file-level and image-level recovery from a single backup, and deduplication for VMware backups.
NetBackup uses VMware Consolidated Backup, a feature offered by VMware that allows consistency and removes the backup burden from the primary VMware server host. NetBackup 6.5 also introduces capabilities to enable a single image-level backup to deliver both full-image or granular file-level recovery.
More information for IT administrators can be found on the Symantec Enterprise website or by calling your Enterprise salesperson. Symantec would not discuss costs associated with the new services.
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