NetBackup in the New Year

[Joe_Pfeiffer]

2010 has been a good year for NetBackup.  We launched the first hardware appliances with the NetBackup 5000 and 5200, launched our cloud storage program with Nirvanix and started integrating with Enterprise Vault (the #1 archive software on the market).  We're planning to continue the momentum of all of these in the new year.

Appliances

If 2010 was the year where Symantec entered the appliance business, 2011 will be where it goes big.  You can imagine that since we based our hardware on PureDisk and NetBackup Media Servers that we have a few other software products that could benefit from a best-in-class optimized hardware platform.  We're planning to do that in in this next year as well as taking the existing 5000 and 5200 and scaling those up to larger capacities.  Providing hardware has been a totally different route to deliver software so we've learned a lot in 2010 and are excited to go even bigger with it in the new year.  The adoption we're getting on the hardware has been surprising well.  I've always thought of Symantec (and Veritas) as a "no hardware agenda" company but more and more hardware is just  a way to deliver software and no longer an "agenda" like it use to be.  The software is where the important stuff is.

Cloud

The industry has been crazy about cloud lately and despite everyones opinion on if you should be putting your data in someone else's cloud or building your own, we've had a number of customers both large and small ask how NetBackup can integrate with their cloud.  The logical step for NetBackup was to take the tried and true concept of a "Storage Unit" in NetBackup, combined with OpenStorage and open it up to cloud storage.  This required some engineering work since latency and connection speed can be very different when sending backup data up to the cloud so after several months of work we released an OpenStorage plugin this past fall with Niravnix.  We even took that work and back ported it to NetBackup 6.5 so users don't have to even be at the latest release, 7.0 (although there is a ton of great stuff in 7.0 that you should consider upgrading to if you haven't already...).  In 2011 we're looking to take that partnership to other cloud storage companies.  We're under embargo right now with all of them so I can't name names but if you've got a cloud storage company you working with already and would like to see an OpenStorage plugin to integrate NetBackup with them, send me a private message and I can let you know where they are on the roadmap or if you ask them directly they may be able to share their plans with you.

Traditional NetBackup

And last but not least, NetBackup is due for another major release this coming year.  It's a little early to talk about everything that will be in it but we're really excited to be working on some features that are totally new for protecting data.  We're focusing on protecting data in major new ways so expect some exciting stuff from NetBackup in 2011!