The future of Windows data protection - today (page 1 of 2)

For many years, VERITAS Software has enjoyed an incredibly successful track record in delivering award winning, market leading backup and recovery software with their Backup Exec product-line. VERITAS Backup Exec as a stand alone product will continue to deliver market leading backup and recovery technology.

However, along with changes in the challenges organisations face in protecting their windows based data comes the need to deliver a new approach to protecting those computing environments. This is where the new VERITAS Backup Exec Suite comes in, setting the new 'Gold Standard' in Windows Data Protection.

Today's IT challenges
Within Windows computing environments the volumes of data having to be accommodated has grown - and will continue to grow - at an alarming rate. Also, organisations are putting more and more dependency on Windows as a platform within their IT environment.

Message based communication, such as email, is for most organisations a Windows based application running on Microsoft Exchange. Applications like Exchange and Microsoft's SQL Server are being more heavily relied upon and are required to be highly available. Not only available, they also need to be performing at a sufficient level to meet user demands.

Conventional backup methods can in some cases impact application performance and availability. Compounding this situation, the storage growth being encountered is having a negative impact on backup windows and backup tape costs. Resources are at a stretch for many organisations, particularly ones with backup servers or data storage distributed within sites or across multiple sites.

This often means not enough people to deal with looking after backups and the IT environment in general. Other factors such as data migration and the consolidation of servers and storage are another common trend within Windows computing environment.

These trends are formed as organisations try to update their technology and reduce the number of physical servers and storage devices they need to manage. So what does this really mean to organisations?

It means a number of things. Backup has always been something that impacts the performance of the server or the application that is being backed up and, because of this, organisations have looked to backup data at times when the impact on the business is minimal.

The current challenge is that the volume of data to be backed up - along with the demands for continuous high availability - means there is no longer an acceptable time to reduce performance or availability and accommodate a backup. Backup windows have become so small that a new approach is needed to reduce the time required to perform a backup.

Additionally, there is a greater expectation with users of the applications that organisations find ways to ensure that they can recover servers and data very quickly and that the data recovered is more current.

Organisations need to find ways to reduce or even remove the performance overhead on critical applications when backing them up, to ensure that the user's ability to do their jobs is not impacted. Another area where organisations need help is in reducing the costs of managing and acquiring their storage devices through controlling what data is stored and being able to clean out old and stale data.

The good news is that all of these challenges can be met with VERITAS Backup Exec Suite.

Backup Exec Suite
Backup Exec Suite combines three technologies to deliver the 'Gold Standard' in Windows data protection:

• Backup Exec 10.0 - the latest release of the market leading Windows backup and recovery software;

• Storage Exec 5.3 - offering hands free management of Windows based data;

• Replication Exec 3.1 - for continuous data protection of remote offices.

Backup Exec™
Backup Exec delivers centralised management and monitoring of multiple backup servers in multiple locations meaning less resource is required to manage the entire backup environment.