Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) and its partners are helping small businesses manage their backup and recovery processes with today’s release of its Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 software product.
The product is designed for small businesses and customers in the mid-market range of 100 to 1,000 employees said Susie Spencer, senior product manager at Symantec.
“Our primary target for this product is small businesses, which can use this as a standalone product because it’s simple and cost effective,” she added. “This product can also work for customers in the mid-market range who want to use this product in conjunction with Backup Exec too.”
According to findings from a global survey titled “SMB (small to medium-sized business) Disaster Preparedness,” conducted by Applied Research on behalf of Symantec from August to September 2009, over half of the survey respondents said in the event of a “serious outage,” they’d expect to lose at least 40 per cent of their data.
“There are a number of small businesses that don’t have a formal disaster recovery plan,” Spencer said. “The biggest opportunity for our partners is to reach out to existing customers who don’t have an existing disaster recovery solution and plan and to also reach out to new audiences.”
Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 gives users the option of scheduling backups to happen automatically, in addition to also providing other forms of security protection in the background, Spencer said. The solution has the ability to restore individual e-mails, files, folders, Microsoft SharePoint documents and even the Windows system in minutes, she added.
In the event of a power outage or a natural disaster, Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 can automate the recovery process to even restore the PC system to the exact point, leading up to the outage.
With the 2010 release, Backup Exec System Recovery is also able to support the latest Microsoft systems and applications including the new Windows 7 operating system, Spencer said.
For customers who need a product to support a virtual machine environment, Symantec has also introduced a Virtual Edition where users buy one license for the host machine and they can then protect an unlimited amount of guest machines, as they are connected to the host, Spencer said. Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 can also support VMware vSphere 4.0, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Citrix XenServer 5.x environments.
Symantec will also be making a Linux Edition of the product available to users next month, with the ability to recover files, folders, the entire Linux system, Red Hat and SUSE.
Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 is now available at a suggested price point of US$795 per server and US$69 per desktop. The Symantec Recovery Linux Edition will be made available in December at a suggested price point of US$495 per server.