Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced its data deduplication strategy, also known as the Symantec Diet, as well as upcoming product releases which will help the company deliver on its strategy.
Matt Kixmoeller, vice-president of product management and emerging products with Symantec’s data protection group, says that the company has updated its deduplication strategy to reflect its data protection and management values.
“We think deduplication should be everywhere and that customers should reduce storage around the whole backup and archive solutions set,” Kixmoeller said.
The main challenge that many customers face today is that their data’s “obese,” Kixmoeller explains.
“Data is still growing and budgets are being crunched,” he added. “Companies and storage admins are finding it hard to keep up with data growth and a flat budget.”
Symantec’s solution to this problem is what Kixmoeller says the company calls the Symantec Diet. It’s a deduplication strategy that partners can use with their customers to illustrate how businesses can reduce data, infrastructure and complexities. Since the channel makes most of its money on services, Kixmoeller said partners can use the Symantec Diet as a blueprint to bring more of a consultative sales approach to their customers. The Symantec Diet is made up of three key components which include reducing data, implementing deduplication closer to the source to store less and reduce overhead costs, and archiving.
By taking advantage of built-in deduplication features, such as in Symantec’s Enterprise Vault Solution, Kixmoeller says redundant data can be eliminated and there will be fewer complexities. Built-in deduplication also allows businesses to reduce the number of tools that are required to manage policies, he added.
“Deduplication lets customers re-use what they already have,” Kixmoeller said. “As part of the (deduplication) strategy, customers can put off buying new storage on average for six months to a year.”
Symantec recently released a new version of its NetBackup solution, which helps users manage, protect and recover their data across storage tiers, locations and the operating system. The newest release, NetBackup 6.5.4, now offers parallel support for both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments, Kixmoeller explains. Also new in this release is Granular Recovery Technology (GRT), which lets users back up the entire virtual machine so in the event of a disaster, the solution can recover the whole machine, or a small file within it. The solution also has integrated disk pool deduplication capabilities too.
“We’re driving towards integrating deduplication in all of our products,” Kixmoeller said. “This will save customers a lot of money and partners will be able to further help customers save on costs by evolving into a next-generation architecture.”
The company will also be releasing later this year its PureDisk 6.6 solution, which offers users improved deduplication capabilities for virtual machine images, as well as a virtual appliance option.
Symantec’s Backup Exec Windows protection and systems recovery solution will also come out with a new release, Backup Exec 2010 during the second half of this year. And NetBackup 7, which will feature client-side and media-server deduplication, will be available beginning next year, Kixmoeller said.