AhmedElattar
When Veritas launched NetBackup 8.1.2 six months ago, it presented revolutionary changes to the #1 enterprise data protection solution in the world. The product was developed with a new user interface design strategy, built on Veritas’ foundation of simplicity, intuitiveness, and integration, while presenting new functionalities to make a users’ job easier.
With a modern design as a guide, Role Based Access Control was introduced, providing virtualization administrators the ability to do certain tasks without having to distract NetBackup administrators—an organizational win.
And that was just the beginning
At Veritas, the Customer Experience team operates and thrives on customer feedback; since the release of NetBackup 8.1.2, the Customer Experience team has worked with hundreds of customers to understand what they loved about the latest iteration and potential improvements.
NetBackup 8.2 takes everything in 8.1.2 and turns it up a notch, making the design crisper, and adding several highly desirable customer-driven user interface features.
Refined control for the administration roles
Customers asked for more delegation capabilities, and more control for the workload administrator to tune protection for key assets. As a result, the capability for backup and workload administrators was expanded—they can now subscribe assets to protection plans and define custom protection for individual assets.
Beyond control, customers also asked for a deeper level of insight into asset protection. In 8.2, users can view detailed information about assets, get a complete overview of how the asset is being protected, and edit parameters such as scheduling, storage, and backup options. For VMware assets, users will be able to perform granular restore operations on individual files and folders.
New look, features, and workloads supported to keep up with the expansion of environments
Through interviews and hundreds of survey responses, the Customer Experience team has received positive feedback from customers about the new web UI, inspiring our efforts to expand its capabilities and introduce new features. Agentless recovery for VMware, integrated snapshot management, and automated disaster recovery in the cloud are all now part of the arsenal in the new web UI.
And there is a necessity to be more agile in the data center. Performance enhancements which enable multiple jobs per second and the additional support of several new workloads have been added.
Simplifying scheduling
In 8.1.2, we introducedprotection plans with basic frequency-based scheduling. To make things even easier, improved backup scheduling has been enhanced to incorporate calendar based scheduling capabilities, combined with frequency-based scheduling into a single model to meet users’ needsto provide more powerful, granular control over how assets are backed up.
Making upgrades smoother
Several customer experience upgrade enhancements have been made in NetBackup 8.2 including: redesign and content updates to the Veritas Support portal to better support the users self-service goals; a consolidated and improved download experience of the Veritas products; an enhanced utility to automate both clients and media servers updates (VxUpdate); a revamped pre-check tool to proactively identify compatibility gaps in the customers environment along with guidance on how to prevent issues; video tutorials; and a streamlined Quick Start upgrade guide for those familiar with the NetBackup upgrade process and who just want to get straight to business.
Keeping up with the databases in the modern and growing data center
It doesn’t just stop with NetBackup’s new and improved user interface. With the exponential growth of big data and the introduction of diverse new tools in the data center, there has been anticipation around identifying improved means of managing information. NetBackup 8.2 now supports several new databases including Microsoft SQL Availability Group, MongoDB, Dynamic NAT, and even External Certificate Authority—all of which are accessible through the new web UI.
Veritas customers have been using NetBackup for over 15 years because Veritas has never wavered from its mission to keep data available and protected. Now, NetBackup 8.2 has simplified the steps necessary to do so, making the process intuitive for all users, and integrations to new workloads easier than ever before.
The Veritas Customer and Partner Engagement Program is a staple of the Customer Experience organization, spanning the entire portfolio and offering multiple opportunities to make your voice heard. Join now to talk to the Veritas product teams and drive NetBackup into the next 15 years.
