Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced its Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7 products and Randy Cochran, the vice-president of channel sales for the Americas, wants the channel to know that now’s the time to start re-engaging with customers.
Last fall, the company released its Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 software product, which is geared towards small and mid-market business customers, ranging from 100-1,000 employees. While the upcoming Backup Exec 2010 release is also designed for these customers, it also can support up to 2,000 users, Cochran explained.
Backup Exec 2010 helps customers protect more data, while empowering them to also use less storage. The solution also provides support for Microsoft Windows 2008 R2, Hyper-V R2, Exchange 2010, Windows 7, in addition to also supporting VMware vSphere 4.0 environments.
Prior to its upcoming NetBackup 7 solution, Symantec had NetBackup 6.5.4. The main enhancement with the new release is that it now has integrated de-duplication technology, which works in both physical and virtual environments. This technology also works at the client, media server and on third-party hardware appliance levels, Cochran added.
“We now offer deduplication technology at the client, media server level, or with an organization’s existing third-party deduplication appliance,” Cochran said. “Backup Exec 2010 is powered by Enterprise Vault so businesses can better manage their data lifecycles by archiving or migrating data over to less expensive storage environments.”
NetBackup 7 helps organizations protect, store and recover their information, all from a single platform. The new solution also includes a built-in reporting and management console, better known as OpsCenter. This standardizes the monitoring and reporting tasks for information that’s backed up or archived. NetBackup 7 also offers complete protection for virtual machines by standardizing backup for Hyper-V and VMware environments. This solution is also targeted at larger business environments, such as data centres.
The objectives with the new products are to help customers store and manage more data at a more effective and efficient fashion, Cochran said.
“Data is growing and customers are struggling with figuring out what files they want to keep and where,” Cochran said. “The key with these products is really the integration aspect of it, where we offer customers deduplication, virtualization and archiving functions.”
For the channel, Cochran says now’s the time for partners to start re-engaging with their customers about these products.
“This is a great conversation for partners to have because in this economic environment, who wouldn’t wan to save more (money) by backing up less (with deduplication)?” Cochran said. “Now there’s an easier way to do this with our products. Right now, a lot of customers are still backing up a lot of duplicate data and this is causing their storage costs to be more artificially inflated than they need to be. Partners can tell customers about the new product enhancements and get them to upgrade.”
Both products will be made available beginning on February 1. NetBackup 7 will have a MSRP of $7.995 for an enterprise server and five client licenses and Backup Exec 2010 will have an MSRP of $1,174 for a media server license and basic maintenance. The two new Backup Exec 2010 software suites, which include deduplication and archiving will have an MSRP ranging from $2,708 to $3,888 with basic maintenance also included.