Symantec looks to appliance, cloud-based delivery

Security software vendor Symantec has launched its NetBackup product in appliance and cloud flavours in a bid to suit enterprise buying trends.

Acquired as part of the Symantec-Veritas merger in 2005, NetBackup was traditionally offered as a backup and recovery software suite.

But "customers are changing the way they purchase products," Symantec's executive vice president and CTO Mark Bregman told iTnews this week.

Symantec today announced its NetBackup 5000 appliance (pictured) and NetBackup Cloud Storage service, which were expected to be delivered from "late 2010".

Built in partnership with Chinese hardware vendor Huawei, NetBackup 5000 could be deployed in less than 20 minutes, instead of "hours to days" of testing, implementation and support processes.

The appliance boasted up to 96 Tb of global deduplication capacity, 99 percent reduction in bandwidth consumption, and support and protection for virtual machines.

"Traditionally, we sold software," Bregman said. "The biggest thing that's new [about NetBackup 5000] is that it's an appliance, which makes it easier for a customer to deploy."

The NetBackup Cloud Storage service was similarly tailored towards enterprise buying trends, integrating Symantec software with the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network.

It offered an "automated and policy-based backup and recovery solution" for businesses that chose to use the cloud either as a new storage tier, or as a secondary off-site location for disaster recovery.

Bregman said Symantec's cloud delivery model had "three legs": services for end-users; technology for cloud providers; and "enabling technologies" that allowed customers to utilise cloud services.

"You're going to see Symantec offer our intellectual property in many different forms," he told iTnews, noting that it had "no plans to move out of the software business".

"I think there will always be a market for software," he said. "One of the things you can be sure of in this industry is that nothing really goes away."

EnterpriseVault 9.0

The vendor also announced the latest version of its Enterprise Vault archiving technology, and Enterprise Vault Discovery Collector that searched both managed and unmanaged data sources.

Enterprise Vault 9.0 extended content source support to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Domino 8.5.1.

But despite Symantec's cloud vision, it had yet to extend Enterprise Vault support to cloud-based email services such as Google's Gmail.

"While there are many enterprises talking about moving to cloud-based email, not many have actually done so," Bregman said, explaining that uptime and information management were still concerns.

He said enterprises had shifted from an infrastructure-centric model to an information focus, where data loss was a greater risk than server failure.

Symantec now had its sights set on four main areas, he said, identifying these as archiving, data loss prevention, hosted services, and enabling technology.

Of the security risks facing enterprises today, Bregman noted that there was "no perfect security, ultimately because people are involved".

In light of consumerisation and the increasing use of social networking from within the workplace, Bregman encouraged enterprises to focus on educating, rather than blocking, employees from social sites.

"When I started in the workplace, for a vast majority of people, the only time they'd see a computer would be in the workplace," he said.

"Social networking provides a very useful tool," he said, likening today's social media landscape to email in the early 90s.