Symantec’s Data Backup: It’s Continuous


Symantec has blended its Windows security application with the popular backup software it inherited by acquiring Veritas to offer customers a continuous data protection (CDP) package.

Officials for the security and data management software maker said the new Backup Exec 10d and Symantec LiveState Recovery applications ensure secure disk-based backup and recovery from any point in time, regardless of the equipment used.

This is crucial at a time when anything from malicious threats, viruses and worms to outages, failures and natural disasters threaten to destroy important data. When one of those events strikes, businesses face the dilemma of lost files in the wake of record-retention regulations that require many businesses to keep data safe, secure and available at all times.

Symantec President Gary Bloom said Symantec’s goal is to treat data availability and security as though they go hand-in-hand, something the company has preached since buying Veritas last year.

Symantec designed the new Backup Exec 10d software to continuously transmit files changes to a back-up server, removing the backup window, said Jeremy Burton, senior vice president of Symantec’s data management group. The backup server stores data on disk in its native format so employees can access and recover individual files with a Web browser &#151 without ever having to call IT for support.

Burton said that with data storage requirements rising by as much as 50 percent per year, small business owners have more data to manage, with less time to do routine system maintenance. Backup Exec 10d and LiveState Recovery 6.0 allow shops using Windows to quickly recover files, e-mail, databases and Windows systems for any computer.

In a demonstration of Backup Exec 10d, Burton and other Symantec officials showed data being lost and recovered with Backup Exec 10d in minutes, much quicker than the time it took to call the Symantec IT help hotline and grab a technical staffer to recover the files.

Because saving data from an application or computer system from a malicious threat, natural disaster or failure is key, LiveState Recovery 6.0 has a “restore anywhere” option that lets you recover any Windows server or desktop to any other Windows server or desktop, independent of hardware configuration.

This eliminates the need and cost of keeping extra, identical hardware available in the event of a disaster. Moreover, LiveState Recovery Manager 6.0 now integrates with Backup Exec to help protect system recovery points and move them to tape for storage off site.

In a demonstration of how LiveState Recovery works with Backup Exec 10d,
Steve Fairbanks, director of product management for Symantec’s enterprise management applications, made a change to a file on an IBM file server.

But the server overheated and blew up, smoke and all.

In a matter of minutes, Fairbanks and Symantec officials replaced the useless husk of an IBM server with a Dell server that was configured completely differently from the IBM server.

Fairbanks popped in a disk and the combination of Backup Exec 10d and the LiveState Recovery almost instantly recalled the changed file software.

LiveState Recovery Advanced Server Suite 6.0 is priced at $1,695 and includes LiveState Recovery Advanced Server, Restore Anywhere Option,
LightsOut Restore Option, LiveState Recovery Manager, and pcAnywhere for LiveState.

BackupExec 10d is also available in a version for Windows Small business Server.

Meanwhile Symantec believes its new CDP approach will be a winner because, as Bloom said in his closing remarks, it is “better, faster and cheaper” than what the competition currently offers.

Adapted from Internetnews.com.

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