Why Roseville is the 1st City on the Backup Countdown Calendar?

[SeanRegan]

Why Roseville?

We started the NetBackup and Backup Exec launch sequence this week with the release of the Countdown to Better Backup Calendar. This was modeled after the idea of an Advent Calendar. Every few days we will open a new window to reveal a new feature of the launch calendar leading up to the product launch. As part of the launch effort each square on the calendar will open in a different city worldwide. This helps us reach our customers and partners in cities around the world and it gives us a chance to bring together all the people who have worked on the release.

Often in marketing it is hard to deliver technical information to the end customers. Everyone is busy, and there is so much noise online it is hard for product announcements to reach customers. One just needs to post a question on LinkedIn asking question about a technology to get a sales pitch from every vendor in the space. Because of the technical nature of backup you often can’t deliver key information in short tag lines or quick bullet points. And, a lot of the things that matter in backup tend to be abstract concepts that aren’t easily explained by a checkbox list of features.

Granular file recovery from a composite backup image is an example, everyone offers it but methods used are completely different.  To understand, you need to get deeper. To help provide a sneak peak at some of the launching technology and deliver some of the detail behind it we opened the first component of the calendar on Thursday in Roseville, Minnesota.

The first feature to be revealed was NetBackup Accelerator. Backup windows are getting smaller as date is getting larger and SLA’s seem to get tougher to meet. A new approach is needed. That’s why we have been working on a technology that gives you the speed of incremental backups with the recoverability of a full backup. Check it out by visiting www.betterbackupforall.com. Aside from the intro video (Backup Warehouse) each of the 8 videos will deliver a short conceptual introduction followed by a more detailed review of the technology by one of our distinguished backup engineers.

So why Roseville? That’s a question a few people have asked me on Twitter and as I talk to customers.  Roseville Minnesota is backup central.  It is the birthplace of NetBackup. It is the head engineering, development, customer support, and product management. Roseville contains one of the greatest concentrations of backup expertise anywhere.  It is where much of the innovation, many of the patents and lots of the new ideas in backup technology get their start. Heathrow, Florida and Pune, India are two other locations I  will discuss in future posts.

This post is about Roseville where innovation becomes reality within the NetBackup product. Imagine backup without underlying technology like this:

• Ability to restore a single file or a full VM from a single backup. That started with NetBackup in 2006 in Roseville.
• The ability to leverage incremental backup technology to create accelerated full backups, which reduces the customer backup window. That started in Roseville.
• Integration with storage vendor hardware through the Open Storage API. That started in Roseville.
• Developed auto image replication that allows NetBackup to replicate and import NetBackup images at a remote/secondary domain. That started in Roseville.

Here is a little of what has been going on in Roseville engineering by the numbers as the team works on the NetBackup 7.5 release.

• Number of employees in Roseville engineering:  262 + 800 across 5 other offices working on NetBackup 7.5 release
• Average number of years of backup experience:  7.4 years of service (Totaling almost 2,000 years of backup engineering experience).
• Number of patents issued: 62
• Lines of NetBackup Code: 10 Million

  NetBackup 7.5  Stats

• 353,547 hourslogged on the project (177 man-years of effort)

Platforms Supported:

• 10 server platforms
• 18 client OS

Together they support:

• 21 operating systems
• 61 different OS versions

Testing:

• 178 NetBackup 7.5 builds were created
• For every NetBackup 7.5 build, over 15,000 automated tests are run against it for validation. 
• 8,299 Etracks generated and resolved for 7.5
• 1,947 issues found in former releases and fixed in 7.5
• Over 6000 virtual and physical lab systems running day and night involved in building, testing and supporting NetBackup 7.5
• 120 customers came from around the world to provide direct feedback to the Roseville team early in the development cycle.
• Over 100 field backup engineers came to Roseville in October to preview NetBackup 7.5 and provide candid feedback.

That’s why we chose Roseville. It’s a center of innovation in the backup industry and where a lot of the future innovations in data protection are under development today.

Follow the www.betterbackupforallcalendar.comto see what’s coming next.

Cheers,

Sean Regan

Sr. Director, Product Marketing

Symantec

@seanjregan

@netbackup

@backupexec