Symantec Corp.today announced the latest release of its Backup Exec product family to provide comprehensive data and system recovery of virtual and physical systems and support for the Windows Server 2008 portfolio. Symantec also adds new Backup Exec systems management and enhanced storage flexibility for heterogeneous environments, allowing organizations to easily protect their data and systems as they grow.

As an increasing number of IT organizations are deploying virtualization into their production environments, they are faced with new data protection challenges, such as backing up virtual machines, meeting strict Recovery Time Objectives and managing these complex environments. As a result, organizations need an efficient and flexible approach to protecting their data and systems within both physical and virtual environments, while reducing server, network and storage requirements and improving recovery time and reliability.

Comprehensive Data Protection for VMware and Microsoft Virtual Environments

The new release of Backup Exec 12.5 allows organizations to easily protect their data and systems in a physical and virtual environment through one, simplified solution. Backup Exec leverages award-winning technology for virtual environments, first introduced in Symantec’s Veritas NetBackup, to provide comprehensive data protection for VMware Infrastructure, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and conventional physical systems from a single console, thereby reducing cost and improving management of multiple virtual and physical systems. Backup Exec also reduces complexity by enabling users to backup an unlimited number of guest machines within a VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V host environment to disk or tape from a single agent. In addition, Backup Exec adds Symantec’s patent-pending Granular Recovery Technology to provide individual file-level and image-level recovery from a single pass backup. Unlike other backup solutions that require multiple backups to allow for granular recovery of files and folders, as well as entire virtual machines, Backup Exec allows users to recover data on a granular or image-level via one backup to reduce the recovery time and the footprint of the backup on storage resources.

Backup Exec also offers tight integration with VMware and Microsoft virtual management framework allowing backup administrators to have a global view of their virtual environment within the Backup Exec administration interface. Users will also benefit from automated configuration and setup of VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) without the need to create manual scripts. Backup Exec provides flexible whole guest virtual system recovery including the ability to rename a virtual machine, change LAN configuration and optionally power-up guest machines following restore.

Complementary to Backup Exec, Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 provides additional support for virtual environments. Backup Exec System Recovery dramatically reduces system downtime by enabling organizations to immediately restore complete Windows systems in minutes, even to dissimilar hardware or virtual environments, in the event of a disaster or system failure. In addition, Backup Exec System Recovery helps users manage planned downtime by adding new functionality to schedule physical to virtual (P2V) system migrations. It also includes support for the latest virtual environments including VMware ESX 3.5, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer 4.1 and will offer integration with the Altiris management platform to provide centralized backup and recovery of servers or desktops directly from the Altiris console. With the new version of Backup Exec System Recovery, IT administrators can capture a backup of a system in a pre-boot state without having to install any software on the system, especially useful for systems that will not boot Windows properly.