Arming Symantec’s back up heroes with V-Ray powers
- Unite Virtual and Physical: Powered by Symantec V-Ray technology, Backup Exec 2012 enables visibility across both virtual and physical environments for fast and efficient backup and recovery while eliminating the need for specialised point products.
- Eliminate Backup Complexity with a New Administration Console: A newly redesigned administration console will provide users with fast, concise management and monitoring capabilities.
- Integrated Disaster Recovery: With bare-metal disaster recovery and Backup Exec’s “no hardware DR” built in, organizations will be able to easily recover a failed system to a physical server, or to a Hyper-V or VMware guest.
- Capacity Licensing: New capacity licensing model for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), mid-sized and lower enterprise organizations will provide easier purchasing and maintenance by capacity as an alternative to existing a la carte pricing.
- Small Business Edition: In less than 10 minutes and with just three simple steps, Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition will install and configure backups so small businesses with limited IT experience can protect their data with ease. The new Backup Exec Small Business Edition will bundle Symantec’s data and system recovery technology into one affordable solution with a single license that’s designed specifically for a growing business.
One size does not fit all
Today organisations of all sizes are faced with managing their disk backup storage growth and improving the speed and ease of recovery of application data, all of which has led to increased complexity for IT administrators. Unfortunately, data protection solutions of old are failing to keep pace with this overwhelming data growth and complexity whereas new data protection solutions are trying to centralise on a single code base and common platform to deliver next generation data protection. The fact is: it just doesn’t work like that.
Next generation data protection solutions need to be complete, powered by disk, and centred on recovery – regardless of size. All organisations are required to protect data in the most efficient way to maximise time and resources – irrespective of size or location. But not only this, they are required to ensure service level requirements are consistently met and at the same time squeezed to improve backup windows and recovery time – all while data growth skyrockets.
In order to manage the way that data protection solutions have altered, technology has had to shift with it. Backups powered by disk make the backup and recovery process faster, more reliable, and automated. It also eliminates the outmoded hassle of trucking backup tapes to a DR facility. In the past, data protection solutions focused on backup, but the focus for businesses large and small is shifting to recovery. That includes system recovery (physical and virtual machines, as well as individual files, documents, users, etc.), disaster recovery, and mission-critical application recovery. Organisations that redesign around disk-based data protection are discovering that they can recover their data quickly and automatically because, in many cases, it is still local and easily accessible.
Because human error is the biggest problem hindering successful recoveries, organisations should look to automation to speed recovery and reduce errors and reliance on personnel. Backup Exec System Recovery is a data protection solution that is optimised for the unique requirements of disaster recovery – because “One Data Protection Solution” does not fit all. It offers:
- Fast, flexible recovery-complete server, desktop, or laptop system recovery in minutes, even to dissimilar hardware or virtual servers
- Granular recovery-individual file, folder, Exchange email and SharePoint document recovery from a one-pass backup, using a single interface
- Cold image recovery-after-the-fact recovery, even of systems that won’t boot
- Central management-single-console management of system backup and recovery environments, including remote systems
- Off-site protection-system protection using remote FTP locations or secondary disk drives for advanced business continuity
I rest my case – thank you!
Disaster Recovery – Just Tick The Box And Move On?
Symantec recently carried out a survey on DR habits and discovered that, on the whole, DR is possibly not as successful as it should be. Seems a bit weird when the same organisations surveyed said that DR has an impact on customers, sales, and revenue. Nearly one-third of organisations reported that DR will impact their customers, while over one-fifth admitted this could also impact their sales and revenue. Hmm, I smell a rat!
OK, it’s pretty simple for me to talk about, but implementing a DR strategy can be difficult. You don’t want to impact the end user or production systems, you also don’t want to make a mess of your infrastructure in the process of putting in the very system that is supposed to save your bacon. As a result approximately half of the organisations surveyed test their DR plans either only once a year or less.
Bottom line: Organisations are not testing frequently enough to improve their plans and are not using adequate tools to reduce the overall business impact.
Ah, well, in that case that’s easy to overcome … unless you have a virtual environment, of course? The Symantec survey reports that only 37% of respondents reported that they back up all of their virtual systems. Currently, native DR tools in virtual environments are immature and don’t provide the top level protection that organisations really need today. While having a DR plan is essential in most organisations, knowing that DR plans work is just as important.
One of the reasons that DR plans fail is because they do have a tendency to become shelf-ware and this is mainly because implementing DR plans is pretty tricky. Well, here’s where you can save yourself some heartache.
Backup Exec System Recovery provides organisations with extended system protection with Scheduled Automated Virtual Conversion – NEW to 8.5 .. what this does is builds on the off-site copy capability. If you have a BESR server at your DR site that can see the duplicated images (FTP’s from the main site) a schedule can be set to convert the images from v2i to either vmdk or vhd formats. Once this process is complete the resulting virtual file can be mounted on a VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V server ready to be booted should disaster occur at the main site – good, hey?
Virtualisation is Causing Re-Evaluation of Backup Plans
Symantec recently carried out its annual IT Disaster Recovery survey of 1,000 or so IT managers across 15 countries. Now, there are a bunch of really interesting facts and it’s well worth a read, but the staggering revelation I think is that the number of applications that IT managers consider mission-critical has jumped 20% in the last year.
We all know that apps like email have crept up on us and become really important to business over the last few years. But what I think is interesting is that at some point in the last 10 years IT has ceased to support the business and become the business! What do I mean – if the lights go out the business stops. The IT Disaster Recovery survey shows that on average 56% of applications are now considered mission-critical. Such a rapid increase may well pose considerable difficulties for, not just high availability but things we take for granted like Backup.
This is particularly true for those organisations who have implemented server virtualisation projects. It is dead easy to deploy virtual machines, but quite as simple to make sure they are backed up properly. I feel particularly sorry for those poor sods using either different backup solutions for backing up virtualised infrastructures or those who do not have an agent for virtualised environments. It must be a nightmare typing to write scripts for each virtual machine! Thank goodness we have Backup Exec!
If you don’t know there is an offer on the Backup Exec Virtual Agent currently – runs to the end of June 2009, so if you upgrade to the latest Backup Exec 12.5 virtual agents and Save Up to 35% off !
Virtualisation is the major factor causing organisations to re-evaluate their disaster recovery plans today. A major challenge is deploying and maintaining the different tools for backup that are needed for their physical and virtual environments–indicating a need for tools that work across multiple operating systems and virtualisation technologies. The top challenge when backing up virtual systems involves resource constraints, which highlights the need for simplified and automated backup solutions that reduce manual tasks for administrators.
