Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that it is expanding on its current alliance with with Dell to deliver a factory-integrated solution that provides disk-based backup and recovery to the PowerVault line of backup-to-disk appliances.
The combined solution includes pre-installed Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 and custom disk management features developed exclusively for Dell.
Pat Hanavan, vice president of product management, Symantec Data Protection Group, said the two industry leaders joined forces to engineer, develop, test and certify a single offering that provides IT organizations with a simple, integrated solution for backup and recovery.
The PowerVault DL2000 with Backup Exec is expected to backup jobs 50 per cent faster and restore data 83 per cent faster than tape, claims Symantec.
The appliance incorporates Symantec’s patent-pending Granular Recovery Technology to allow users to perform a single-pass, application or system-level backup of Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX environments while still maintaining the ability to recover individual objects, including files and folders. This technology is unique to the market and eliminates the additional time and storage requirements of a second file-level backup, enabling efficient data protection and faster restores.
As IT organizations continue to deploy virtualization into their production environments, they are faced with new challenges and an additional layer of complexity with managing data protection on virtual machines. Backup Exec 12.5, which is pre-installed on PowerVault DL2000, adds new capabilities to help users reduce their complexity by enabling them to back up an unlimited number of guest machines within a Hyper-V or VMware ESX host environment from a single agent.
Backup Exec also uses several VMware technologies including VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to reduce the amount of data end users need to backup.
Through the automated management console, the PowerVault DL2000, which is expected to be released later on this month, may eliminate the need for manual installation and configuration.
This is an all-in-one appliance solution for centralized management of backup and restore functionality.
In addition, solution providers can utilize the PowerVault DL2000’s integrated management console to set backup policies and conduct system monitoring and maintenance from a central location for customers. This allows organizations to manage backups for remote offices without having an IT expert on site.
Users can also seamlessly transfer their backups on disk to tape from the same management console for offsite disaster recovery with the Dell PowerVault tape drives and libraries.
Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager, Dell storage, said customers are trying to deal with unprecedented data growth.
