Veritas Software has announced major upgrades to its
storage backup products which are designed to tackle the management
of data in an automated, policy-based manner and address regulatory
compliance needs.
The latest products include NetBackup 5.0, Data Lifecycle
Manager 5.0 and CommandCentral Service 3.5, said Glenn Groshans,
director of product marketing at Veritas.
NetBackup 5.0 allows storage administrators to use incremental
backups of business applications on top of a previous full backup
to create updated, full restorations of that data.
Previously, full backups, which take hours to complete, were
required for administrators to restore business applications.
When used with Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0, the software creates
a virtual archive and indexes the data for later searches and
retrieval, both of which are required by regulatory agencies.
"It lets you maintain an audit trail on all media types,"
Groshans said. "You can set policies that define how you want data
handled based on characteristics such as file type [and]
workgroups... and push that policy out to servers."
For example, he said, a legal department might want to set a
policy that all financial documents be saved for two years on
near-line disc arrays and then migrated to tape for an additional
five years.
Veritas has also integrated its CommandCentral software with its
flagship NetBackup and Backup Exec applications to create a single
management interface.
CommandCentral is a utility computing application for backup and
recovery on disc subsystems. The web-based portal allows an IT
manager to define levels of storage service based on user needs and
reports back on those systems for chargeback purposes.
Steve Kenniston, an analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, said
Veritas' latest offering still falls short of a true information
lifecycle management product, which would automatically manage data
storage from creation to deletion.
Although the Veritas software does not capture the data at the
business application level, Kenniston said the company has
addressed a large number of issues facing storage administrators,
not the least of which are service-level agreements and
chargeback.
Lucas Mearian writes for Computerworld