The Doyle Report: Veritas Launches NetBackup 8.0 to “Accelerate Digital Transformation”

Veritas this week is launching NetBackup 8.0 and the availability of its most ambitious Enterprise Data Management solution yet, says Scott Anderson, senior vice president and general manager of the company’s Information Products Solutions Group.

Veritas is so confident that the innovations will have a transformative impact on the market that it believes they will help “accelerate digital transformation.” While that may be a bit of marketing overreach, Veritas has good reason to be upbeat.

The new NetBackup 8.0 enables Veritas to execute on a vision announced in September to “integrate data visibility, application resiliency and copy data management” into a single platform. Veritas says that the new NetBackup 8.0 “reduces risks, ensures application service levels, assists in meeting regulatory compliance demands and extracts new value from data.” (That’s where the claim “accelerating digital transformation” comes from.)

Hoping to get more insight in the release, its impact on the channel and the position it puts Veritas in, I reached out to Anderson for some insights. Anderson has been with the company for almost 16 years and has seen plenty of product introductions and strategy announcements during his tenure. He believes this announcement to be the biggest since the company became an independent company earlier this year. (Veritas effectively split from Symantec a year ago and has been privately held since The Carlyle Group bought the company in January 2016.)

^{Scott Anderson, SVP, Veritas}

“With NetBackup 8, we are really talking about unified data protection. This means we can protect virtual and physical devices in the cloud, both public and private,” Anderson says. “It’s a fundamental change where we have gone with NetBackup before. Historically we have focused on backup data, which is critical… But now we are looking beyond a copy of data from a recovery standpoint to provide better business insight, better recovery of applications and better provisioning to multiple business users.”

The company’s driving design goal behind NetBackup 8.0 was to extend the value of the data under management. That lead to the creation of the three design paradigms that define NetBackup 8.0, which were made possible by the web services layer and APIs built into the technology.

The first  is the integration of data visibility, which is accomplished by the integration of NetBackup 8.0 and Veritas Information Map. The latter provides customers with a graphical view of their backups. The second pillar, Predictable Resiliency, is achieved via the integration of the Veritas Resiliency Platform and NetBackup 8.0. Veritas says the integration provides “predictability for all resiliency operations, including workload migration, failover, failback, data protection and non-disruptive recovery testing.” Finally there’s Integrated Copy Data Management, which is achieved via the integration of Veritas Velocity and NetBackup 8.0 to help “organizations to use their existing backup catalogue to provide rapid access to information and save time.”

The combination of benefits can help partners and customers alike answer some fundamental questions about their data. This includes how and when data is being used, when it makes sense to move it to the cloud and even how to leverage meta data for greater business use.

Anderson says NetBackup 8.0 will help partners provide better compliance services to customers and smarter infrastructure assessments.