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Backup Exec 10d for Windows Servers, starting at $795
LiveState Recovery Advanced Server 6.0, starting at $1,695
Veritas Software
Mountain View, California
(650) 527-8000
http://www.backupexec.com/presskit/
Symantec's Veritas Software this week launched new versions of its data protection products Backup Exec and LiveState Recovery. I haven't had a chance to kick the tires yet, but their product team did spend a while last week briefing me on the new capabilities. It looks like this is an exciting time to be in the data protection field - as well as a time when things are at a tipping point. If you're used to thinking in terms of tape drives and standby servers for every box in your data center, we may be entering a new world where protection is considerably faster and less expensive than it used to be.
Start with Backup Exec 10d - the d stands for "disk". Using agents that hook right into the file system, it watches as new data is written to the disks of your file servers, and continuously whisks it away to a hefty disk in a centralized continuous protection server (you can set up a variety of topologies; one central protection server with a group of agents is just the simplest). The result is that you eliminate the nightly downtime and "backup window"; your data is simply backed up as it's written, and to relatively cheap disk instead of relatively expensive tape. You can couple this with a Web-based retrieval agent that offers users self-serve recovery when they screw up and delete an essential file to eliminate IT involvement in the most common recovery scenario entirely.
This continuous protection is a supplement for the Backup Exec capabilities you may remember from previous versions, not a replacement. You can still do backup to tape, and if you're dealing with other types of data - Exchange Server, for example, or database servers - you'll still need to use specialized agents that understand the transactional nature of the data and schedule timed backups. But it's a great step forward for the routine daily stuff, and it eases considerably the pressure on needing to back up an ever-increasing amount of data using the old strategies.
Livestate Recovery addresses another part of the protection puzzle: what to do when a server blows up entirely. Traditionally, the answer has been that you keep a duplicate server with identical hardware around so you can recover from your latest disk image without worrying about things like video and disk drivers. If your data center has a mishmash of different servers (as so many small and medium businesses do) this can obviously get expensive fast). LiveState Recovery gets around this with a new feature called "Restore Anywhere." By working with VMware, they're provided a virtual environment that you can use to pull in disk images, and then shoot them out to new hardware. The end result is that you can restore any image to any server, or to a VMware VM, without worrying about hardware incompatabilities. So now, maybe you only need to keep 2 or 3 standby boxes around instead of 10 or 15. Big win, I think.
Other advances in LiveState Recovery include integrated pcAnywhere technology to allow remote recovery to the point of being able to just unpack a server, plug it into the remote LAN, and restore it all from central IT (assuming the hardware supports appropriate remote boot and provisioning standards, anyhow), integration with Backup Exec, and network bandwidth throttling so it will play nice with other applications.
All in all, if I was responsible for a real business and not just my own motley collection of hardware, I'd be taking a serious evaluation look at this stuff. Both products have trial versions available over the Web.
Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.
Published September 29, 2005