Symantec partners will have a lot of new opportunities after the torrent of new initiatives the company unveiled at its annual Vision users conference this week. Announcing a spate of offerings in all of Symantec’s sweet spots, from endpoint security to IT governance and backup to storage management, the firm is revving up to finish out the second half of 2011 on a strong note. Channel Insider has taken the liberty of offering partners a round-up of the product announcements bound to make the most impact.
Backup
Symantec has big plans to modernize the way organizations backup, recover and discover their data across the IT infrastructure. This starts in the short-term with some key enhancements to its Backup Exec product portfolio and the addition of a cloud-based service designed to cater to the SMB market.
Key among the backup additions :
- The new Symantec V-Ray technology embedded directly into core Symantec NetBackup and Backup Exe offers easily see, protect, and recover their virtual machines with the same solution that protects their physical environments. Symantec likens it to ‘X-Ray’ vision into virtual environments, ideally giving customers a way to reduce labor-intensive file and application recovery efforts and comfortably expand virtualized infrastructure without worrying about backup capabilities.
- Other updates included in Backup Exec 2010 are SSL support from the agent to the server, as well as improved archiving for data management and recovery. SSL support gives an extra layer of security for customers that transmit backup data across the WAN or to a private cloud. Meanwhile, the archiving enhancements complement backup by helping companies identify what to store, what to delete and when to move older data to secondary systems, while ensuring fast discovery and recovery of older data.
- Symantec is also extending its Backup Exec solution to the cloud with Backup Exec.cloud, and a preconfigured backup appliance that will remove the need for hardware and software integration for small business end users. Expected to be available later this year, Symantec Backup Exec.cloud will automatically protect the data on Windows desktops and servers with simple, online backup and recovery.