News

Veritas Deepens Ties with Microsoft Azure in Next-Gen Offerings

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• September 21, 2017

Veritas is extending its integration with Microsoft Azure as part of an effort to provide more support for hybrid and public clouds in its portfolio.

The company announced its intent to deepen its ties with Azure at its annual Veritas Vision customer and partner conference this week in Las Vegas. Other announcements included its plans to extend the data deduplication and optimization capabilities in NetBackup and Backup Exec, Veritas' flagship backup/recovery and disaster recovery offerings.

Veritas also introduced a software-defined storage offering for massive amounts of data called Veritas Cloud Storage, designed to apply intelligent analytics and classification to improve data discovery.

After its spinoff from Symantec in 2015, Veritas was late to address support for the major public clouds: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The company stepped up its efforts last year by bringing native integration with these three platforms to NetBackup 8 and Backup Exec 16. At the same time, Veritas pledged to make data protection and management across hybrid environments a priority. 

Among the key announcements from last year's Vision event was a partnership between Veritas and Microsoft to add deeper support for Azure. Earlier this year, the two companies extended their agreement to include Veritas' data archiving solutions such as Enterprise Vault.

The deliverables announced at this week's conference include integrated support of Veritas' data archiving, management and orchestration tools with Azure. Specifically, the Veritas Resiliency Platform (VRP), which provides backup and disaster recovery management, orchestration and automation across multiple clouds and on-premises storage, will establish Azure as a recovery target. It provides monitoring failover and failback to and from Azure.

Also, a new release of the Veritas Access software-defined storage NAS scale-out file system supports Azure cloud storage. Veritas Access enables simultaneous access for multiprotocol file and object types such as NFS, CIFS, FTP, SMB and S3. And the company's relatively new Veritas Information Map, a visualization tool designed to give administrators real-time, aggregated and detailed views of where data is stored for cost management and risk mitigation, will support Azure Blob Storage and Azure File Storage, as well as other Microsoft cloud storage services.

Veritas launched Information Map with a grand plan of giving administrators extensive visibility across the spectrum of cloud and on-premises storage. Building on that, the company announced the new Connection Center, designed to provide visibility into 23 different cloud stores, with more planned. In addition to Azure Blob Storage and Azure File Storage, Veritas said it will be rolling out connectors to OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, G Suite, GCP Cloud Storage, AWS S3, Office 365, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

The company said Information Map can help determine which data must be preserved to help meet compliance regulations such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will take effect next year. Information Map connectors will support a variety of other Microsoft and third-party data sources. The integration with Azure will be available in the coming quarters.

Also announced at the conference was the new NetBackup 8.1, aimed at large enterprises, which brings improved data deduplication to improve backup and recovery times and lower bandwidth utilization. Also new in the release is Parallel Streaming, aimed at supporting hyperconverged clusters and scale-out backups for Big Data workloads, including support for HDFS.

A new release of Backup Exec 16 FP2 for small and midsize organizations also offers improved deduplication, and the new CloudConnect Optimizer brings improved network bandwidth utilization. In addition, building on its support for Azure, the Backup Exec upgrade will add compatibility with Azure Government and Azure Germany, as well as AWS S3 and GCP regional class storage.

The new Veritas Cloud Storage offering, now in beta, is designed for huge amounts of data. The company said its new data store will offer support for MQTT and COAP for addressing new IoT workloads, in addition to supporting AWS S3 and standard Swift object storage protocols. Veritas said organizations can use it in geo-distributed scenarios and can support complex storage polices, suited for GDPR and other environments where sensitive data is handled.