Veritas Unveils New NetBackup, KVS Software

Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of Veritas' data management group, said the company's new NetBackup 6.0 brings expanded data-snapshot capabilities, including the ability to manage snapshots created by other vendors, which provides what he called a universal recovery tool.

Burton also unveiled Enterprise Vault 6.0, the first major new release of the e-mail archiving application Veritas obtained with last year's acquisition of KVS. The software includes enhancements for archiving and recovering Microsoft Exchange files as well as the ability for xSPs to serve multiple customers with a single instance of the software. He also gave sneak peeks at upcoming technologies, including software to be released next year that's designed to virtualize storage capacity on a SAN for backup.

The Veritas product news shows how a rising number of functions are being consolidated into storage management, said Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Systems Group, a Denver-based solution provider. "We're seeing the consolidation of storage management software pulling in such disparate functions as archiving and e-mail management and putting them together in a common family," he said.

A big part of that consolidation is the integration of KVS into Veritas, according to Teter. "It's a very powerful move," he said. "Archiving has traditionally been a stovepipe operation to data protection, and it shouldn't be. Veritas is taking archiving from the early-adopter model to the mainstream."

With NetBackup 6.0, Veritas is adding the ability to discover and catalog all of a company's backup-copy data, including data snapshots, regardless of whether they're created by NetApp, EMC Symmetrix or Hitachi Data Systems Lightning arrays, or if they're done via Unix, Linux, Windows or Veritas Storage Foundation--as well as regardless of the application.

The various array, operating-system and application vendors provide their own types of data snapshots, making it difficult to centrally manage them, Burton said. "With NetBackup 6.0, we manage all the snapshots no matter where recorded. So now it's a universal recovery tool, whether the data was backed up by Veritas or not," he said.

The integration of full system recovery in NetBackup 6.0 also makes it a bare-metal recovery tool, according to Burton. Bare-metal recovery is the ability to bring up a downed system even if the operating system crashes. "To recover, phase one is to get the system back up," he said. "Phase two is to get the data back up."

Veritas, too, is moving toward what Burton called a "Google-like" interface that would allow users to search for and recover specific files from data archived to disk no matter where it's physically located. In addition, Veritas aims to integrate more of NetBackup's functionality with Network Appliance storage hardware, the fruit of an 18-month technical alliance, he said.

NetBackup 6.0 has been optimized to use NetApp's NearStore arrays as a disk-to-disk backup target, Burton said. When backing data up from a NetApp NAS Filer to a NearStore array, the software scans the data for duplicate files and eliminates duplicates to cut storage capacity requirements. Also new is the ability to logically mount a NearStore disk as if it were a Windows drive to let users restore a file as if it was stored locally, he said.Early next year, a new version of NetBackup, code-named BigHorn, will focus on backing up data to a SAN, Burton added. Though NetBackup currently can share a tape library on a SAN for backup, a new technology dubbed Golden Spike will allow disk capacity to be virtualized into a single pool for use in disk-to-disk and disk-to-disk-to-tape backups, he said.

"So you can pool storage on a SAN, share it regardless of platform or application, and write data to the pool," Burton said. "And if you reach capacity thresholds, new storage can be auto-provisioned into the pool."

Also expected from Veritas next year is data reduction technology that lets a file be scanned and broken into manageable chunks. Each chunk has a unique signature, and as data is copied remotely to a central office, each chunk is compared with what is already stored and, if it's a duplicate, isn't stored again, which reduces the amount of capacity needed to store data and cuts the bandwidth needed for remote backups, he said.

On the archiving side, Veritas' new Enterprise Vault 6.0, which in the past focused on Microsoft Exchange environments, now also works with Lotus Notes and SMTP e-mails, Burton said. It also supports archiving data created by users of SharePoint, Microsoft's collaborative workspace tool. "We think SharePoint will clean up on this market," he said.

Another new feature is a "sniffer" for discovering Exchange PST files, which Burton said are created when users meet maximum capacity units and move data to other repositories. "But if you upgrade Exchange, or do a discovery, you can't find all the PST files," he said. "This sniffer finds all the PSTs and keeps the links to them."

Enterprise Vault currently allows one customer's e-mail to be archived per instance of the application, but the new version will allow multiple customers' e-mails to be archived, making it suitable for service providers, Burton said.

Next year, Burton said to watch Veritas to do more to orchestrate backups and archiving. For instance, when data is archived with policies that say when it should be deleted, the policies often don't apply to backups of the archive, he noted. The result: A company may think it deleted old data, but that information may still exist on tapes. In addition, when users restore files, they eventually will be able to pull a file from a backup or an archive repository no matter where it was restored.

Advanced Systems Group's Teter said he has been impressed with Veritas in terms of how it addresses new functionality in its storage applications and how the company is embracing of security via its acquisition by Symantec. At one time, Advanced Systems Group had moved into the security market but then pulled away as it sharpened its focus on storage, but after this year's Vision conference, the solution provider aims to start focusing on security and storage, he said.

"I just talked to one of my sales reps," Teter said. "He says he walks away from security opportunities every day because we need the engineering support."