Veritas is scaling its enterprise data protection platform with the acquisition of Hubstor and release of NetBackup 9. The enterprise backup and recovery software provider didn’t say how much it’s paying for Hubstor.

Hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud, Hubstor protects SaaS workloads including Microsoft 365, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Slack, Box and Google Drive. The acquisition of Hubstor raises questions about the future of the company’s existing Veritas SaaS Backup. For now, Veritas is delivering both SaaS backup offerings. But officials aren’t saying what the future holds for Veritas SaaS Backup.

The current Veritas SaaS Backup is based on an OEM agreement with Keepit. By acquiring Hubstor, Veritas officials said the company can integrate it with its Enterprise Data Services Platform (EDSP). Based on Veritas InfoScale, NetBackup, InfoStudio and APTARE, EDSP provides data protection, availability, discovery and analytics.

Veritas’ Greg Hughes

“Hubstor significantly expands our capabilities to address SaaS based workloads, such as Microsoft 365, to deliver a complete backup-as-a-service solution,” said Veritas CEO Greg Hughes, speaking during an online event to launch NetBackup 9.

Veritas is not yet saying how – or if – it plans to integrate Hubstor specifically with NetBackup.

“Because of its API-driven nature, we’ll see that become very easily integrated into our EDSP platform, and become a big component of that,” Veritas senior director of product and solutions marketing Eric Seidman said in an interview.

Seidman described Hubstor as a good complement to the capabilities NetBackup offers.

Veritas’ Eric Seidman

“NetBackup 9 is associated with hybrid and cloud-native backup of applications, on prem to the cloud,” he said. “Hubstor is really focused on those applications that run only in the cloud. And so it’s a perfect complement for our portfolio.”

Scale-Out Architecture Introduced in NetBackup 9

NetBackup 9, which Veritas released this week, introduces a new scale-out architecture to its flagship enterprise backup and recovery solution. It also offers more automation, enhanced security (including protection of backups against ransomware attacks) and support for OpenStack infrastructures.

The new scale-out option, which Veritas calls Flex Scale, lets partners deliver NetBackup in software-defined and in hyperconverged infrastructure. The ability to scale out is necessary for organizations undergoing digital transformations and are implementing container-based cloud-native application architectures.

Veritas customers have pushed the company to offer a scale-out option for NetBackup, Seidman said. As companies have deployed new cloud-native and modern applications, over time they introduced point data protection products, according to Seidman. “They’re really looking to standardize on a single platform across the enterprise,” he said.

“We’re providing a true scale-out solution,” added Tim Burlowski, speaking during a session at this week’s launch event. “And that means they’ll have a system that can grow on a node-by-node basis, where we mix server, storage and compute all into a single node. As your environment grows, you can continue to grow with it, while not really having to change or administer it differently. And that’s a big advantage.”

Azure Tiering and Deduplication

NetBackup 9 also comes with enhanced tiering to the long-term retention archive storage tier of Microsoft Azure, similar to what Veritas added to NetBackup 8.2 for AWS.

“We’ve enhanced the experience for our customers in tiering backup data to Azure by deduping that data significantly before it is stored to that tier,” Seidman said. “They can store it in the lowest cost – albeit at the lowest performance tier – in Azure directly without moving that data.”

Microsoft group program manager Vamshidhar Komminen led the engineering team that worked with Veritas tiering capability. The current cost to save data to the Azure archive tier is approximately $10,000 per year, according to Komminen.

“Coupling NetBackup’s de-dupe capabilities and being able to write natively to this tier is going to be fantastic in terms of cost savings,” he said.

NetBackup 9 also supports Microsoft’s new Azure VMware Solution, a validated private cloud offering consisting of vSphere clusters. Also added was support for Azure Stack, Microsoft’s on-premises cloud offering for edge locations.