SYDNEY, Australia – 9 February 2012 – Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced Backup Exec 2012 to help users eliminate complexity, perform backups in 100 percent virtualised environments and deliver instantaneous and cloud-based recovery through a single solution. As part of the new release, Symantec transformed Backup Exec’s user interface and configurability to provide a significantly simpler customer experience. Symantec is also expanding its leading technology to small businesses with Backup Exec Small Business Edition, enabling growing organisations to back up their information in three simple steps in less than 10 minutes.

“Backup is a critical part of a protection strategy, and with mounting digital assets and shrinking IT budgets, growing organisations need to find a way to keep costs down without compromising availability of their information,” said Amit Walia, vice president, Information Management Group, Symantec. “With close to two million businesses worldwide trusting in Symantec Backup Exec, it is our responsibility to help IT professionals and small business owners become backup heroes.”

Backup Exec Portfolio Now Includes:

• Backup Exec V-Ray Edition: Backup Exec V-Ray Edition will give virtualisation architects the option of having industry leading Backup Exec technology protect their 100 percent virtualised environment and the option to easily extend protection to physical environments, if needed, without having to buy a separate solution.
• Backup Exec Small Business Edition: In 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. 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 businesses with up to three servers.

Backup Exec 2012 will deliver the following benefits:

• Eliminate Backup Complexity with a New Administration Console: A newly redesigned administration console will provide users with fast, concise management, simplified experience, and monitoring capabilities. The new user interface will also automatically configure the most common and successful policies and settings, drawn both from Symantec’s many years of experience and from the Backup Exec community, to allow for quick configuration of systems and protection of data and applications with minimal effort.
• 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. Backup Exec 2012 will also provide true single file recovery, deduplication and backup management for VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers in a single product enabling significant storage and management savings.
• Integrated Disaster Recovery: With Backup Exec’s integrated bare metal and “no hardware disaster recovery,” organisations will be able to easily recover a failed system to a physical server, or to a Hyper-V or VMware guest. Backup Exec’s powerful and patented recovery capabilities enable granular restore of entire virtual machines, single files, Active Directory objects, Exchange Emails, or SharePoint Documents from any single-pass physical, VMware or Hyper-V backup.

Availability
Symantec Backup Exec 2012 will be generally available for purchase in spring 2012 through Symantec’s worldwide network of value-added authorised resellers, distributors and systems integrators or directly.

Supporting Quotes
“When we deployed Backup Exec 2012 in production, it immediately reduced our backup window by almost 24 hours every week. Backup Exec 2012 has afforded us the ability to base weekly full backups from an enumerated virtual machine image thereby providing best in class data protection. The simplicity of the new user interface has streamlined the process for setting up new backup jobs in our environment and saves an immense amount of time,” said Brandon Mosak, Network Manager, Task Force Tips, Inc.

“Symantec Backup Exec 2012 is a user friendly solution that maintains the highest degree of data protection.  The first time I saw Backup Exec’s new user interface, I knew it was going to revolutionise how I manage our backup environment,” said David Lewis, LAN administrator, Health New England. “Backup Exec’s P2V recovery will be the biggest time saver for disaster recovery.”

“Our IT environment is 90 – 95 percent virtualised, and we continue to leverage this technology to reduce costs and the number of physical servers,” said Jason Drake, director of Infrastructure and Security, Premiere Global Sports. “We have trusted Backup Exec to backup our data for several years and the transition from a physical server infrastructure to virtual infrastructure didn’t change our choice in a data protection solution. Symantec’s V-Ray technology embedded in Backup Exec allowed us to easily expand to a virtual environment and feel confident in our decision.”

Related

• Press Kit: Symantec Delivers Better Backup for All
• Webcast: Better Backup for All
• Webcast: BackupExec 2012 Technical Deep Dive
• SlideShare: Better Backup for All
• Blog Post: Virtual Visibility: Why you need X-Ray Vision to Backup Virtual Machines
• Survey: Broken Backup Environments Need New Approach
• Website: Countdown to Better Backup
• Video: Managing and Reducing Costs of Enterprise Data Protection Video featuring Dave Russell, Gartner and Brian Dye, Symantec

Connect with Symantec

• Follow Symantec on Twitter
• Follow BackupExec on Twitter
• Join Symantec on Facebook
• View Symantec’s SlideShare Channel
• Subscribe to Symantec News RSS Feed
• Visit Symantec Connect Business Community

About Storage from Symantec
Symantec helps organisations secure and manage their information-driven world with storage management,  archiving, eDiscovery, backup & recovery solutions.

About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organisations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com or by connecting with Symantec at: go.symantec.com/socialmedia.

New survey data reveals that the current approach to backup modernisation is broken

SYDNEY, Australia – 9 February 2012 – Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced it will deliver a new approach for modernising backup and recovery, a process that has become unnecessarily complicated and expensive as organisations’ data stores grow exponentially. Compared to traditional backup, Symantec’s approach enables 100 times faster backup, eases management and simplifies recovery if a disaster occurs, helping customers realise significant cost savings while better protecting their business information. Over the last 20 years data has exploded, virtualisation has become widely adopted and service level agreements (SLAs) have become near impossible to meet. These challenges also affect the smaller businesses that struggle with backup complexity and are at risk of data loss due to a disaster. The current approach to modernisation introduces an ever-growing collection of point solutions resulting in added complexity, increased costs and headaches for backup administrators, network administrators and executives.

“The single most dramatic change is scale – or volume – of data, applications and virtual machines which cannot be processed by current backup environments. Organisations have increased service level agreements, rising expectations of availability and the need to run in a 24/7 business model. When combined with trying to integrate new technologies, it adds up to a disruptive environment with a huge impact on IT teams. Organisations small and large need a holistic protection strategy, a single platform or solution, to handle the variety of data types and workloads as opposed to integrating a number of disparate point solutions, which proves to be costly and time consuming,” said Dave Russell, vice president of Storage Technologies and Strategies, Gartner.

“Today, Symantec unveils a radical new plan to modernise data protection that will drive out 80 percent of the operating costs associated with backup over the next five years,” said Deepak Mohan, senior vice president of Symantec’s Information Management Group. “Symantec is announcing a new set of solutions that address the problems in backup – from the most complex of enterprise data centers requiring a true tiered-recovery strategy to the smallest business that needs the confidence that they can easily recover their data.”

Symantec recently surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals worldwide on their backup practices and their ability to recover information in the event of a disaster. The findings reveal that traditional approaches to backup are broken and a new approach is vitally needed:

• 49 percent of respondents can’t meet service level agreements (SLA’s) due to too much data
• 72 percent of respondents would switch backup product if speed doubled
• 28 percent say they have too many backup tools
• Organisations average four backup solutions to protect physical systems, and three for virtual
• 42 percent of respondents believe that their virtualisation backup is not adequately or perfectly working
• More than a third (36 percent) of respondents would not bet their paychecks that 100 percent of backed-up data could be recovered

According to Symantec’s 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, SMBs are not making disaster preparedness a priority until they experience a disaster or data loss. Half of respondents do not have a plan in place and 41 percent said that it never occurred to them to put together a disaster recovery plan. The survey data reveals that the cost of not being prepared is high, putting an SMB at risk of going out of business.

Key components to Symantec’s unique approach to data protection are the NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012, designed to help Symantec’s more than two million backup customers address backup issues common to companies all over the world. Symantec’s strategy focuses on the following areas:

• Change the Operating Model of Backup: Symantec’s strategy is to eliminate 80 percent of the operating cost of backup by delivering an integrated platform that replaces multiple solutions typically used in backup today. Symantec backup appliances can drive down costs even more than traditional appliances by combining backup software and deduplication into a single solution supported by a one vendor, that is fast to deploy and easy to manage.
• Break the Backup Window: 100 times faster backup with NetBackup 7.5, compared to traditional approaches, means organisations can complete full backups at the speed of incremental backups without sacrificing recoverability to meet critical service levels.
• Fight Infinite Retention: Too many organisations keep backups for too long. Knowing when information can be deleted can significantly reduce costs and management burdens on IT. New backup search capabilities in NetBackup give IT the ability to separate out what is relevant to legal or compliance investigations while keeping the rest of the backup infrastructure running on a more typical 30-60-90 day backup cycle. Infinite retention is infinite waste for IT and infinite risk for legal.
• Unify Snapshots and Backup: A snapshot without NetBackup is just a snapshot. A snapshot with NetBackup is data protection, manageability and recoverability. Unifying snapshots and backup with NetBackup gives organisations the speed of snapshots with the recoverability of backup.
• Stop Putting Tapes on Trucks: With the help of Symantec NetBackup technology, organisations can modernise their disaster recovery strategies and stop the practice of shipping tapes by truck. Symantec NetBackup Auto Image Replication (AIR) allows customers to eliminate volumes of physical assets and prioritise files that can be sent over the network, while significantly reducing the chance for human error.
• Unite Virtual and Physical Backups: Reduce operating costs around virtualisation with patent pending Symantec V-Ray technology that enables organisations to have deeper visibility into their VMware and Hyper-V machines for virtual backups with a single product. Integrated in NetBackup and Backup Exec, V-Ray delivers load balanced virtual machine backups to eliminate backup storms, improve virtual machine performance and reduce storage by deduplicating data everywhere, whether it is on VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers resulting in up to 90 percent storage reduction.
• One Product for Any Recovery: Symantec provides one solution for all backups whether they are based on tape, disk, or in physical or virtual environments. Customers can recover any application or system to a virtual machine whether they have the hardware or not. Physical to virtual recovery is now included for free in Backup Exec, simplifying disaster recovery by automatically creating a virtual machine when recovery is needed. New backup to virtual (B2V) technology is also available to accelerate the migration from physical to virtual servers as part of the backup process.
• Eliminate Complexity: Backup Exec has eliminated backup management complexity by simplifying the user interface, utilising insights from millions of users, policies and licensing. This allows IT administrators and SMB owners to have a professional data protection strategy without being backup professionals.
• Easy Backup: Symantec introduces Backup Exec Small Business Edition ensuring smaller companies can set-up proper data protection in less than 10 minutes and in three simple steps.

Related

• Press Kit: Symantec Delivers Better Backup for All
• Webcast: Better Backup for All
• Webcast: NetBackup 7.5 Technical Deep Dive
• Webcast: BackupExec 2012 Technical Deep Dive
• SlideShare: Better Backup for All
• Blog Post: Virtual Visibility: Why you need X-Ray Vision to Backup Virtual Machines
• Blog Post: NetApp Storage Efficiency Insights
• Survey: Broken Backup Environments Need New Approach
• Website: Countdown to Better Backup
• Video: Managing and Reducing Costs of Enterprise Data Protection Video featuring Dave Russell, Gartner and Brian Dye, Symantec

Connect with Symantec

• Follow Symantec on Twitter
• Follow NetBackup on Twitter
• Join Symantec on Facebook
• Join NetBackup on Facebook
• View Symantec’s SlideShare Channel
• Subscribe to Symantec News RSS Feed
• Visit Symantec Connect Business Community

About Storage from Symantec
Symantec helps organisations secure and manage their information-driven world both on-premise and in the cloud with storage management, archiving and eDiscovery, backup and recovery solutions.

About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organisations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com or by connecting with Symantec at: go.symantec.com/socialmedia.