Symantec Corp. kicked off the start of its Vision user conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday by unveiling a host of enhancements to its Veritas NetBackup offering, pooling together new data protection, virtual machine recovery and integrated support of third-party backup appliances. NetBackup 6.5 incorporates native disk-based backup, data de-duplication features, as well as heterogeneous snapshot and continuous data protection (CDP) functionality. The latter feature enables the software to provide centralized management of consolidated snapshots taken from storage arrays of vendors including EMC Corp., IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., and Hitachi Data Systems, a subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., according to officials of Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec.
Later this year, the product will add block-level CDP capability offering point-in-time snapshots that can be journaled and replayed to NetBackup to speed up data backup operations, officials said. A NetBackup client on the primary storage array will replicate to the CDP server hosting and managing snapshots to enable data to be kept on cheaper storage. NetBackup 6.5 is equipped with a new storage area network (SAN) client that lets storage administrators perform SAN backup to a disk pool. Further, the upgraded backup tool can be married to Symantec"s PureDisk de-duplication technology to minimize unnecessary file duplication and wasted storage space, Symantec officials noted.