As you may have seen, Symantec have announced the release of Enterprise Vault 9.0 and the NetBackup 5000 appliance. On the Enterprise Vault side, customers have been very eagerly awaiting both the Exchange 2010 SP1 support and the new Discovery Collector offering.
The first question many customers have is, “What? An appliance? Is Symantec becoming a hardware company?” Let me hit that one straight on – NO. I strongly believe that the value in both data protection and archiving is in the software, and an appliance is one of many form factors to deliver that value.
So what is Symantec’s strategy for Information Management? In short, they are working hard to help customers delete more of their information. Most customers we talk to are seeing 30%+ year over year data growth with flat or shrinking budgets, so they need a comprehensive approach to tame that beast. We recommend four key ingredients for success: protect completely, de-duplicate everywhere, delete confidently, and discover efficiently.
Protect Completely
The need for an enterprise to protect its data has not changed from 10 years ago and I’d argue it won’t change 10 years from now. What will change is the shrinking backup window available to protect it, the need for ever faster recovery, and continued budget pressure. Only Symantec offers the breadth of technologies - OS/application support, archiving, virtual synthetics, CDP/R, dedupe, deep VMware / Hyper-V support – and the continued R&D investment to deliver here.
Deduplicate Everywhere
In talking to customers, many realise that the first and best area to de-dupe is actually in the application itself, using archiving (Enterprise Vault). By offloading data from the primary application, you can improve application performance, save money on storage, and back it up once instead of time and time again. After that, the next best place to de-duplicate is at the client level and Symantec support that with the embedded dedupe in NBU 7. For some performance-sensitive apps, you’ll instead want to de-dupe at the media server level. For other environments, such as remote offices, it is easiest to drop in a dedicated appliance like the NBU 5000.
The key to all of this, though, is that customers need to be able to adopt all these forms of de-dupe without buying four different tools and becoming System Integrators. Information management is supposed to “just work,” and not having four tools is the right place to start.
Delete Confidently
What if you could keep just 30 days of backups online and replicate for DR? You could get rid of tapes completely, save a ton of money, and restore much faster.
Meet with the retention setting group at your company to ask them why the retention policy says “data must be kept on tape for 10 years.” Ask them, “What if I could keep the data you need for 10 years and get you EXACTLY what you need, do it within 24 hrs instead of 1 week, and save money.” Once the retention managers understand what archiving can do for them, you can get the flexibility you need to run your environment differently.
Discover Efficiently
Most customers I meet with has dealt with legal discovery (some weekly), and realise the increasingly painful distraction it is to IT. You can find the data fast (good for IT), find ONLY the relevant data (good for risk), and hand over as little as possible to your own solictors for legal review (good for saving money).
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