NEW - NetBackup 7.0.1 Release

[Stephen_Stange]

The 7.0.1 release continues to build on the strong foundation started with NetBackup 7. Customer adoption of NetBackup 7 has been faster than any of our previous major releases and 7.0.1 will only further accelerate this adoption. 7.0.1 has several exciting new features in it as well as updates for NetBackup 7, here are a few highlights.

Client Offline: This feature allows you to easily designate specific clients as being offline or unavailable for backup for a fixed period of time. By doing so you can reduce the amount of time  spent troubleshooting failed backups that were known to be offline to begin with. Specific duration times can be set so the client  will automatically come back online and resume with the next incremental or full backup.  I know you will be excited about this feature because it was the top voted feature on our ideas portal (symantec.com/connect/ideas). By the way, if you have not already done so, please visit this site, register, and let your voice be heard. We do listen to you, this feature is proof (it is referred to as client enable / disable on the portal)!

Audit Trails:  If you need to track policy changes and restore jobs, you will love this feature. With Audit Trails you will better understand who changed what policies and when. This feature also details who executed which restore jobs and what they restored.  When troubleshooting backup jobs – it helps to answer the question “what has changed”? This feature is accessed via command line in this release, and will be expanded on in future releases. A great start that provides meaningful value today and a solid foundation to build on going forward.

NDMP improvements: We have made two significant improvement in our support of NDMP. First we have introduced a stream handler which allows our Deduplication engine to intelligently look inside the NDMP stream to provide the maximum Deduplication rate possible.  Additionally we are introducing multiplexing support for remote NDMP backups. This feature allows you to multiplex multiple NDMP streams together to better take advantage of the high through put rates of today’s tape drives. This allows you to keep the tape media streaming, improving backup performance.

Hyper-V Volume GUID support: Those of you using Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology will no doubt welcome this enhancement. NetBackup now supports the use of volume GUIDs in these environments instead of simply drive letters.  Volume GUIDs have been Microsoft’s recommend way of configuring clustered Hyper-V volumes and now NetBackup can backup and restore using these GUIDs. Of course those of you still wanting to use drive letters will continue to be supported.

Enterprise Vault 9 agent: 7.0.1 provides agent support for those of you running Enterprise Vault 9. This agent greatly simplifies the process of backing up and restoring your Enterprise Vault environment. A note to those of you not yet using Enterprise Vault,… what are you waiting for? Enterprise Vault should be a vital part of your information management strategy. By effectively implementing email and file system archiving you can significantly shorten your backup windows, lower the amount of storage required for backups, and improve your ability to find critical information in a discovery event.

Finally 7.0.1 introduces a number of proliferations providing new application and platform support. Please consult the various compatibility lists on our support site for the full list.
As you can see, this release is far more than a simple release update. I encourage you to upgrade right away to take advantage of this new functionality.  Thanks for being a NetBackup customer!