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VM Backups, Recovery Improved with Newest Symantec NetBackup

The first upgrade of NetBackup in two years addresses large growth in data and virtual machines.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 01/27/2014

A new version of NetBackup that Symantec released last week comes with a significant performance boost and is fine-tuned for environments that use VMware's vSphere replication engine.

With NetBackup version 7.6, Symantec senior product marketing manager Greg Simon said there is a company-wide emphasis on improving the of the company's software. "Across the board there's an increased emphasis on quality," Simon said. "This release is preparing customers for the next generation of the modern data centers."

On a high level Symantec said NetBackup 7.6 is designed for organizations evolving their infrastructure to software defined datacenters. While its early days even those at the cusp of making that transition, the new release is designed to automate large scale data protection. According to the company's own research, the amount of data organizations are creating is increasing at up to 70 percent yearly, which the new release is designed to address by providing more automation and faster performance.

Simon emphasized NetBackup 7.6 also addresses the shift to the growth of virtual machines and targets VMware environments. Specifically it uses NetBackup Replication Director to protect VMware environments, according to Simon. It can also use NetApp snapshots taken from its arrays to protect virtualized environments. The new release can recover VMware vSphere VMs 400 times faster than its predecessor, the company claims.

VMware's dominance notwithstanding, it's not the only hypervisor organizations are using. So what about Microsoft's Hyper-V? "Going forward one of the major focuses on the next release will be Hyper-V," Simon said.