Symantec announces Veritas NetBackup 6.5

Symantec has announced what it claims to be the first product that allows IT professionals to centrally manage tape, disk and virtual machine storage.

Veritas NetBackup 6.5 has a single console to manage tape and disk-based backup, data de-duplication, integration with backup appliances and virtual tape libraries across heterogeneous environments. The product also allows the recovery of critical applications and virtual machines, and has a per terabyte licensing and pricing programme.

Kris Hagerman, Symantec's group president of data-centre management, insisted the company was the first vendor to bring a centralised heterogeneous storage-management product to market. "This is the first end-to-end solution to deliver across heterogeneous storage environments," he said. "We are the only vendor to do this. Other vendors have different alternatives — EMC if you just run EMC products, HP if you only run HP, Microsoft can if you just run everything on Microsoft. However, Windows has no ability [to manage heterogeneous environments]."

"We innovate on top of open standards like S-MIS, but we also get to look at Solaris, Windows, Linux, HP and IBM source code," Hagerman added. "In terms of a layer of software to manage any server — I don't think anyone will do this. That ship has sailed."

John Thompson, Symantec's chief executive officer, said that many customers running heterogeneous storage environments did not have the resources or enough staff with the necessary skills to manage such a complex environment. "Customers come to us saying 'I don't have enough staff to manage a heterogeneous environment'. Our storage products take the complexity out," said Thompson.

Veritas NetBackup 6.5 is part of a Symantec initiative called Storage United that aims to provide a layer of data protection, storage management and archiving software in data centres.

Symantec said it will "continue to announce new products that use common infrastructure and technologies in areas such as product installation, security, graphical user interfaces, web services, data sharing, consolidated agents, workflow and joint [company] products."

Veritas NetBackup 6.5 is due to be released in late summer. Pricing information was not made available.