Going above and beyond

Selected by five Network World contributors, these category-breaking products raise the bar with their novel approaches to solving today's enterprise challenges.

By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 02/27/06

The category breaker: Symantec's Backup Exec 10d for Windows Servers

The columnist: Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, "Eye on the Carriers" columnist

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What makes this product so special? By way of background, in October 2005, Symantec introduced Backup Exec 10d for Windows Servers. Backup Exec includes a tool called Backup Exec Continuous Protection Server that provides disk-to-disk backup of updated versions of files, and a built-in search engine that lets users search for restored data by content and file name.

The product was developed by Veritas (acquired by Symantec in December 2004) and joins a lineup of continuous data protection (CDP) solutions from major vendors, including IBM (which recently announced Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files) and Microsoft (which recently made available its long-awaited Disk Protection Manager), as well as start-ups. CDP start-ups include Mendocino Software (licensed and supported by EMC), XOsoft (available through BMC Software), Lasso Logic (recently acquired by SonicWall), Mimosa Systems, Storactive, TimeSpring Software, FalconStor Software, InMage Systems, Kashya , LiveVault and Revivio.

Although Backup Exec 10d joins a crowded field, it represents a milestone for two key reasons. First, as an offering provided by a major vendor, it highlights the mainstream emergence of CDP as a key trend in business continuance. With CDP, business-continuity planning is becoming less about periodic batch backups of centrally stored data, and more about ongoing management and availability of information across the enterprise in real time.

Second, Symantec's move highlights another significant trend toward enterprisewide information stewardship, a holistic approach to information protection and security, data-quality management, information life-cycle management (ILM), business continuance and compliance. In a recent Nemertes benchmark, 87% of participants said they consider effective information stewardship vital to the organization - and a backup/ILM product offered by a security vendor is uniquely positioned to combine information protection with ILM and business continuance.

Given that it's offered by a security vendor, Backup Exec 10d marks a transition point in data and information management: positioning backup not in isolation, but as part of an overarching information stewardship architecture, which enterprises say they desperately lack. The overwhelming majority - 86% - of enterprises that participated in the recent Nemertes benchmark on information stewardship said their organizations' infrastructure was insufficient to support their information stewardship needs. Better and more integrated ways of protecting data (against corruption and loss) rank high in these enterprises' wish lists of needed infrastructure.

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EMC enters continuous data protection fray
10/24/05

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