Veritas Overhauls Product Lineup, Launches Update of NetBackup

Ahead of its planned separation from Symantec Corp., Veritas on Tuesday unveiled new datacenter offerings and upgrades to its backup and information management products, including immediate availability of the next version of NetBackup.

Doug Matthews, vice president of the Information Availability business unit at Veritas, said the product line overhaul resulted from the "Envision 2019" strategy exercise that Symantec initiated more than a year ago.

As Veritas looked at all the information its backup, recovery and information management products touched, product managers realized a more comprehensive approach was necessary.

"Infrastructure and information sprawl are unbelievable, out of control," Matthews said in an interview. The spread of data across on-premises systems, private clouds and public clouds is making it harder for companies to be aware of, let alone prioritize and get maximum value out of, the data they have. "How do people handle that situation and ensure that they get value out of that information?" he said.

Veritas' attempt to address those issues will come out over the next few months as Veritas prepares for an operational separation from Symantec that is planned for October, with complete separation set for January 2016. Symantec will go forward as a security business, while Veritas will take all products related to backup and recovery, storage management, clustering, disaster recovery, archiving and e-discovery.

The new offerings and architectures include:

Veritas NetBackup 7.7: NetBackup, which is Symantec-Veritas' flagship backup solution and a key product for many Microsoft partners, began shipping in the latest 7.7 version on Monday. New features include enhancements in virtualization scenario support for both VMware vSphere 6 and for Microsoft Hyper-V. Brand-new in version 7.7 is support for cloud connectors that allow hybrid cloud deployments that use Amazon Web Services, Google Nearline and other cloud platforms.

Veritas InfoScale: Veritas is relaunching and rebranding its Storage Foundation as InfoScale. A software-defined storage approach, InfoScale provides Web-based management of multi-tiered applications. By using on-host flash and direct-attach storage, the goal, Matthews said, is to provide the "benefits of a SAN without the cost of the infrastructure."

Veritas Data Insight 5.0: In beta now and planned for general availability (GA) in August, the 5.0 version of Data Insight will expand Veritas' platform for applying unstructured data analytics to retention management, access compliance and other information management policies.

Veritas Information Map: Also planned for an August GA is Information Map, a cloud application that Veritas describes as being able to "glean meta-data from Veritas NetBackup, store it in the cloud and present this data in a user-friendly, visual navigation tool that helps identify areas of risk, areas of value and areas of waste across a customer's primary content repositories."

Posted by Scott Bekker on July 07, 2015