Symantec Connect - Backup Exec - Blog Entries

Install Blog (DVD Install Media Validation)

Nick Elmer — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:15:47 +0000

It has been awhile since my last post, and I apologize for that absence! Our team (myself included) has been diligently working on the next big release of Backup Exec (2012)! There are many changes in the new user interface that we think you will love. However, I don’t want to focus on those items, as there are many other blog contributors who are already talking about those. Instead, I want to discuss what has and has not changed, with respect to our install. Today’s post focuses on our new DVD Install Media Validation feature.

With Backup Exec 2012, when you run the install, you will now see files and paths updating in the splash screen. During this process, the installer is validating the required files needed to install. If all the files successfully verify, the install will launch and run as it always has. If there are missing or corrupt files in our required directories, the installer will log the affected files, and ask if you want to view the install log. There, you can determine what files are missing or corrupt, and take the appropriate action. We are confident that this feature will eliminate install failures due to poor downloads, incomplete media, and other related causes. One example of where this may come into play is a RAWS install. Customer copies the RAWS32 directory from the DVD to a remote machine for a local install. In this case, they will see a failure. Why, because our install expects to find the RAWS32, MSXML and DOTNETFX directories on the media. If we need these components for the install, they will be missing. So, we will log the missing files and return an error. In previous products, we would log the missing directory only if it was required to complete the install, though we never validated the directory contents in any way. In this release, we are validating the file(s) in the directory, as well as the directories presence.

I designed this feature after spending time in our support group assisting with cases. Too often I saw corrupt or invalid media causing unnecessary install failures. This feature was also requested for similar reasons by “PKH”, (a trusted advisor who regularly posts in our technical forms). This feature will enhance confidence in our install processes, both for you (our customer) and our internal support organization. I welcome your comments and/or feedback on this feature.

Nick Elmer

Here is a screen shot of what you will see during the installer startup with Backup Exec 2012.

What’s New In Symantec Backup Exec 2012

Amit Walia — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:13:46 +0000

In December we announcedthe availability of a partner-only beta release of Backup Exec 2012 and Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition. The beta program was a huge success with literally hundreds of partners participating, providing valuable feedback and sharing their successes with us.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Symantec Backup Exec 2012.

Backup Exec 2012 is truly the culmination of our global team of expert engineers who spent million plus man-hours singularly focused on changing the playing field of backup software. And the result is an amazing product that is focused around three key themes: Eliminating complexity; providing virtualization-centric protection; and our offer to customers of one product, any recovery. As these themes are an essential component to the product, I’d like to expand on each of them.

Eliminate Complexity

As we worked with and listened to our customers and partners, we found that flexible delivery models were needed in the form of software, appliances and cloud-based backup solutions. In addition, small businesses have some unique needs that should be accounted for. So, in addition to completely reworking thousands of lines of code, we have provided Backup Exec in four standard editions:

Backup Exec V-Ray Editionfor customers with 100 percent virtualized environments that don’t want to pay for a separate product.
Backup Exec Small Business Edition for small businesses with limited IT experience that want to protect their data with ease.
Backup Exec.cloudfor customers who want simple off-premise data protection through a fully secure cloud-based service that is easy to setup, manage and configure.
Backup Exec 3600 appliancefor customers who want an all-in-one, affordable data protection solution for physical or virtual environments that reduces backup windows and storage and management costs.

In addition, we literally redesigned the user experience of Backup Exec 2012 from the ground up to offer our customers an user interface that helps them focus on the resources they are protecting, rather than solely on the status of jobs. Administrators can monitor the backup status of critical application servers, see issues and performance over the last seven days and view other key indicators that allow them to make important decisions about how to properly protect their environment. Simply put, we are enabling our customers to focus on running their business versus managing technology processes.

Virtualization-Centric Protection

Virtualization is a technology change that is growing exponentially in our segment. We have been seeing tremendous growth in the past, and in this release we are doubling down on virtualization focused products. Our customers have told us that they want one product to backup their physical and virtual infrastructure to reduce costs as well as increased visibility across their infrastructure. While Backup Exec 2012 provides the best technology for physical and virtual infrastructures, our new offering Backup Exec 2012 V-Ray edition is focused on the 100 percent virtual environment. This product supports both VMware and Hyper-V environments. It also provides all of the benefits of V-Ray technology to Backup Exec customers. Our V-Ray edition is extremely well positioning to leverage the rapid growth of the Virtualization mega-trend and drive significant growth.

One Product, Any Recovery

SMBs want complete recovery but it should be seamless as well as cost-effective to implement. Backup Exec 2012 simplifies bare-metal disaster recovery for servers. It provides hardware-free recovery with physical-to-virtual and backup-to-virtual conversions for instant restore in a virtual environment. And, recovery to the cloud makes it easy and inexpensive for SMB customers to integrate to their cloud environments.

Making Backup Easier with Intelligent Backup

Aidan Finley — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:56:10 +0000

Have you ever seen pictures of the control room in a power generation plant? It’s an entire wall of dials, knobs, and gauges, all telling you important bits of information about the system. That’s great – and probably necessary! – if your only job was to manage that power plant. But as an IT professional, you have lots of daily jobs; some of you manage Exchange, SQL Server, firewalls, security, storage, servers, you name it. Backup and recovery might be only one of the many jobs you do on a daily basis. And here at Symantec, we don’t want your backup application to be like that power plant – we want you to be able to sit down, do what you need to do, and get on with your day.

Backup Exec has an entirely new user interface. You’re going to like it – it’s simpler, more intuitive, and much easier to navigate. We’ve also taken a lot of time to keep all those great features you are used to in previous versions of Backup Exec – so this interface is going to appeal to the new Backup Exec user and the seasoned professional. At-a-glance status is easily available in Backup Exec 2012, both from servers you are protecting and from the storage you are using to store your backups. The latest version of Backup Exec is just a cleaner, more intuitive way to manage your backup and recovery environment.

We’ve also included a new way to create and manage backup jobs and policies. No longer do you need an advanced degree in Data Protection to set up disk-to-disk-to-tape backups or replicate data between sites – the new Backup Stages feature shows you, in graphical detail, how your backup data will be transferred, when it will be backed up, and where it’s going to be transferred to.

Speaking of backups, how many of you just want to create backups to protect your critical servers and applications without any headaches? How many of you would rather not pore over every detail of application backups? Well, if that sounds like you, Backup Exec has made it much easier for you to set up backup jobs, because we have included some seriously intelligent defaults - based off our own expertise in data protection and by taking the most successful backup configurations from our customers and partners - and building them into Backup Exec. If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of backup job creation, however, Backup Exec has all the same great features and customizability you have used before – so you have the right tools to get the job done.

With Backup Exec, we’ve also stepped up our “telemetry” program – gathering non-personally identifiable information from our customers and partners who choose to participate in the program. This gives us invaluable intelligence about how backups and restores are working in the field, and we have used that information extensively to make Backup Exec the easiest to use, full-featured data protection application for physical or virtual environments on the market.

Be one of the first to find out what other new ground breaking backup and recovery features are coming soon in Backup Exec. Visit the Countdown to Better Backup web site here: http://bit.ly/yenx3z

PartnerNet Group

System Recovery the Easy Way

Kate Lewis — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:54:42 +0000

Have you ever experienced a complete system failure and then realized that you don’t have the correct hardware to be able to recover the failed system to? Or have you ever experienced a system failure and found yourself scrambling to get that system up and running when time was of the essence?

System failures are an unfortunate yet all too common occurrence, and they always seem to happen at the worst possible moment. To make matters worse, if a physical server hosting multiple critical virtual machines goes down, all the virtual machines go down too and the severity of downtime dramatically increases. Some of the more common reasons systems fail include hardware failures, user errors, malicious attacks, and natural disasters. Regardless of the cause of system failure, downtime and business interruption can cost your organization thousands and even millions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity if you don’t have the proper backup and recovery solution in place.

Recovering a system manually has many significant and inherent challenges. The foremost is the time it takes to rebuild a system or host machine from scratch. Depending on your environment it may take hours, days, or even weeks to restore a system. This is because replacement hardware needs to be sourced before rebuilding each layer of the computing stack, both of which are time-consuming activities. At a time when every second counts, manual system recovery is slow and inefficient.

What if you could recover a failed server without worrying about the type of hardware that failed, without the need to format or partition the local server disks or install an operating system, or better yet without worrying about hardware altogether?

The next release of Symantec Backup Exec enables you to do exactly that. With new integrated disaster recovery technology built into Backup Exec, you will be able to easily restore business critical servers from bare metal or to dissimilar hardware from a tape or disk backup in minutes. During the backup process, Backup Exec ensures that the backup set contains all the critical operating system components needed to perform a bare metal or dissimilar hardware recovery. In the event of a disaster, whether your hardware is reusable or not, Backup Exec has you covered.

And that’s not all. Also, in the next release of Backup Exec come two more exciting features. The first is physical to virtual conversions, known as P2V, and the second is the ability to backup directly to a virtual format, known as B2V. These two new features enable you to get that server backup and running in a VMware or Hyper-V environment in the time it takes you to turn on a virtual machine! Disaster recovery is now truly hardware independent and Backup Exec is now truly a solution that offers any recovery – an entire system down to granular objects in minutes.

Overall, Simplified Disaster Recovery technology integrated into the next release of Backup Exec will deliver dramatically faster, simpler, and pain-free disaster recovery for all. The result is rapid recovery that significantly reduces downtime and service interruptions. This is another great example of how Symantec is helping organizations modernize backup, and one great reason to learn more about the future of backup with Symantec.

Be one of the first to find out what other new groundbreaking backup and recovery features are coming soon in Backup Exec. Visit the “Countdown to Better Backup” here: http://bit.ly/yenx3z.

New! Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool

Bill Felt — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:40:29 +0000

What is it?

The Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool (BEDAT) is a utility designed to help partners demonstrate the value of Backup Exec and its deduplication technology to their customers. BEDAT scans user-selected data sets on one or more Windows-based systems in a customer’s network environment and estimates the deduplication savings that would be experienced if the same systems were protected using Backup Exec or the Backup Exec 3600 Appliance and deduplication. BEDAT returns global deduplication results, per resource deduplication results, and per data type deduplication results. BEDAT does not actually capture or transport any customer data during the assessment process; it only captures deduplication fingerprint information and transmits this data to be included in deduplication results.

How does it work?

The Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool (BEDAT) installs to almost any Windows-based, x86 or x64 computer system. When run, it can calculate deduplication results for the system on which it is installed, as well as other systems available on the network. When capturing deduplication data from remote network systems, a small agent is temporarily installed to the remote servers and removed after deduplication calculations have been completed. BEDAT is designed to be as simple and as easy to use as possible. It is a wizard-driven utility that does not require any specific IT expertise to use successfully.

Who is it for?

The Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool (BEDAT) is designed to be used by Backup Exec partners as they help customers understand the storage optimization benefits of the deduplication technology found in Backup Exec and the Backup Exec 3600 Appliance.

Where can I get it?

The Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool (BEDAT) is available for partners to download at the Symantec PartnerNet site. For end user customers interested in using BEDAT in their environments, please contact a local Symantec partner.

How much does it cost?

The Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool (BEDAT) is made available to Symantec partners at no charge. However, a PartnerNet account is required in order to access and download the tool.

What platforms and data types are supported?

The Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool (BEDAT) supports Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 x86 and x64 platforms, including both physical and virtual systems. It supports estimating deduplication results for file system data, Exchange data, and SQL data.

Notes

While designed to be highly accurate, the results offered by the Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool (BEDAT) represent estimates of the storage savings that would be gained by using Backup Exec or the Backup Exec 3600 Appliance and deduplication.

BE Deduplication Assessment Tool_Solution Brief.pdf

PartnerNet Group

First Availability for the gold build of Backup Exec 2012

James McKey — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:49:26 +0000

(EDITED 2012-01-30: Changed to state the download is now available and highlighted the available video download)

The gold build of Backup Exec 2012 is now available for immediate download as part of the First Availability program. If you have maintenance for Backup Exec (or are a partner) then you can sign-up using the following link:

Backup Exec 2012 - First Availability

Below are some of the key new feature capabilities:

New User Experience

Resource-centric management, with a focus on management by exception and ease of deployment
Easy data lifecycle management
Simplified Scheduling
Simplified restore experience – Restore Wizards help you decide what, when, and how to restore applications and data
Storage Management Improvements – Graphical visibility into backup storage capacity and utilization

Disaster Recovery

Simplified Disaster Recovery - Bare Metal recovery from CD/DVD
Virtual Conversions: Conversions of physical machines and backups to Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines

There is also a short video included to help give you an overview of the bigger improvements.

Inside Backup Community

Symantec Invites Channel Partners to Participate in the Exclusive Backup Exec 2012 Partner Beta Program

Amit Walia — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:15:17 +0000

Today, we’re announcing the availability of a partner-only beta release of Backup Exec 2012 and Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition. Open exclusively to Symantec’s 60,000 global channel partners, the beta release will provide partners early access to one of Symantec’s market leading backup and recovery solutions. Symantec wants to work with our partners to help customers fix the new challenges on controlling data growth, unifying virtual and physical platforms, and simplifying backup.

The partner-only beta release will help Symantec’s partners address the three major “C”s of most backup environments of their customers: Complexity, Cost and Chronically shrinking backup windows. Our partners have told us that they need to give their customers a simple, single application that protects both virtual and physical environments and that is easy to configure while reducing overall management complexity. Such a solution should not add another expensive tool and should help them reduce overall costs in the IT infrastructure. Finally, with ever-expanding data growth, our partners have told us they want to deliver to their customers a tool that can help them address existing backup window challenges and restore applications, files and servers quickly after a disaster.

The beta release adds new features and benefits to help our partners address new challenges for their customers:

Increased visibility:Virtualization has added a new layer of complexity by fragmenting backup (virtual and physical) and not allowing admins to see and manage both environments. With V-ray technology, users have one console providing visibility across the backup environment – including both virtual and physical.
Data explosion:Throughout the years, although the amount of data being backed up has exploded and a new approach is needed to effectively back up business critical data. To address the problem of data explosion, Backup Exec 2012 beta will help organizations meet recovery objectives by completing full backups in the amount of time incremental backups take.
Disaster recovery:It takes too much time and money to rebuild physical machines. To address the problems that exist around disaster recovery, we’ve implemented physical to virtual system recovery, which simplifies recovery if/when a disaster occurs, allowing users to create a virtual machine to replicate the physical one, allowing fast and easy recovery.
Backup management:As data has grown, backup strategies and management grew in complexity setting up backup as way more complicated than it needs to be. To address this problem, we’ve implemented intelligent backup, which makes it dramatically easier to set up and manage backups by providing a simpler interface utilizing insights from millions of users.

Also, because we know many SMBs are implementing virtualization technologies, among other innovations, we’re offering a new Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition which will install in less than ten minutes and with three simple steps. The new Backup Exec Small Business Edition will bundle Symantec’s data and system recovery into one solution with a single license designed for a growing business.

We’re excited to provide this beta release to our partners as our first step in fixing the backup problem with an end to fragmented point solutions.

Backup Exec Beta programs

James McKey — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:38:35 +0000

UPDATE (12/9): The VMware plug-in and Cloud Services Beta/UAT programs have ended and are now in GA (General Availability). The Kaseya plug-in is in the First Availability (FA) cycle and you can sign up for that program here:
Backup Exec Management Plug-in for Kaseya - First Availability

There are a few Beta programs tied to the Backup Exec product line currently in play and that still have some openings (each link provides lots more detail in addition to providing the sign-up opportunity):

Backup Exec Management Plug-in for Vmware - Auto-recovery (URL removed) Beta (integration with ApplicationHA - High Availability product line)

Backup Exec Management Plug-in for Kaseya - Beta (URL removed) - Advanced Remote Monitoring & Management for Backup Exec 2010 R3 servers

Cloud Services for Backup Exec 2010 R3 - Release Candidate (URL removed) Private Cloud opportunity geared towards Managed Service Providers and Branch Office WAN setups

If you have any questions you wish to ask beyond the detail provided at each link before you sign-up, don't hesitate to email me via your Connect account messaging options.

Announcing the NEW Backup Exec 3600 Appliance

Kate Lewis — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:13:41 +0000

Today at VMworld® 2011,Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) announced the general availability of the Backup Exec 3600 enterprise backup appliances to help organizations modernize their backup infrastructures and accelerate new initiatives around virtualization with greater reliability. Symantec backup appliances can be deployed in as little as 30 minutes and help organizations protect information completely, in physical or virtual environments, and deduplicate data everywhere to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Backup Exec 3600: Visibility and content-aware deduplication across physical and virtual systems

Equipped with Symantec V-Ray technology, Backup Exec 3600 appliance provides the same unique visibility into virtual environments as Backup Exec 2010 software to allow organizations to speed recovery times and reduce storage costs. Symantec Backup Exec 3600 is the first all-in-one backup appliance with integrated client and target data deduplication for protecting virtual and physical machinesfor medium sized companies with limited IT staff. Backup Exec 3600 will support the upcoming release of VMware vSphere® 5, and is the only solution available with Backup Exec on optimized hardware and software.

Backup Exec 3600 is a simple and reliable backup appliance designed to reduce IT complexity by providing:

Virtual server visibility:Backup Exec embedded V-Ray technology makes data and application recovery a simple process. With Backup Exec, administrators have a clear catalog view of their backup sets from which the administrator can select an entire backup set or a single object in that set and click to restore.
Platform availability:The appliance can protect key operating systems and platforms and offers deep application and database support for faster backup and restore.
Reduce integration complexity:The Backup Exec 3600 appliance features integrated and optimized hardware that is certified to run the latest Backup Exec 2010 software, and enables a single point for technical support. Using an advanced installation wizard, the Backup Exec 3600 appliance can be up and running in minutes.
Total protection:Along with advanced technologies such as source and target deduplication, the Backup Exec appliances also includes Symantec Critical System Protection for total virus and malware security protection.

Availability

Backup Exec 3600 series appliances is available now in North America. Both appliances will roll out in additional countries in a phased approach over the next year. Existing Backup Exec users can repurpose existing licenses to deploy the Backup Exec 3600.

For more information, please visit the Backup Exec Appliances product page on the Symantec's website.

Out Now: Backup Exec 2010 R3 V-Ray

Kate Lewis — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:11:34 +0000

Today at VMworld® 2011, Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) announced new V-Ray technology enhancements to Backup Exec 2010 to provide organizations with greater visibility into their physical and virtual environment with a single backup solution, saving time and reducing overall complexity. The latest version of Backup Exec 2010 will support VMware’s upcoming release of VMware vSphere® 5 and integrates with Symantec ApplicationHA to predict and trigger an application restore if ApplicationHA is unable to remediate an application failure. This first-to-market integration helps IT administrators feel confident in expanding their VMware adoption knowing they can now eliminate costly downtime of mission critical applications within virtual environments. Backup Exec’s V-Ray technology also includes the new virtual machine validator feature to allow administrators to easily resolve backup issues by validating the recoverability of VMware backups through integration with the VMware vCenter™ Server administration console.

“When it comes to backup, businesses must standardize on one product for physical and virtual protection if they seek the greatest storage savings and the least amount of management. Backup Exec V-Ray update provides new predictive VMware recovery, integrated deduplication and automated backup protection of new guest machines to help customers increase cost savings while eliminating downtime,” said Amit Walia, vice president of product management for Backup Exec, Symantec Corp. “Now with integrated VMware recovery powered by ApplicationHA, Backup Exec opens the floodgates for more critical systems to be virtualized.”

Overall Backup Exec’s embedded V-Ray technology provides backup and virtualization administrators with a simpler data and application recovery process. The new Backup Exec V-Ray features give administrators a clear catalog view of their backups so they can then select an entire backup set or a single object to restore from either their physical or virtual environments. Backup Exec’s first predictive recovery feature, powered by Symantec ApplicationHA helps reduce downtime of tier one mission-critical applications in VMware environments, and also provides new recovery validation and broad platform and application support for the upcoming VMware environment – vSphere 5.

“Symantec’s V-Ray technology provides our joint customers with across-the-board integration and the ability to view deep inside their virtual machine for optimized backup, security and availability of VMware,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. “Symantec’s latest Backup Exec V-Ray updates provide significant operational and technical benefits and helps ensure that users will not have to run separate solutions for physical and virtual backups – ultimately helping to accelerate virtualization and cloud adoption without reinventing backup.”

Backup Exec 2010 is VMware Ready™ and provides innovative backup and recovery features to protect VMware environments:

NEW VMware vSphere 5 support, upon its release allows Backup Exec to provide broad platform and application support including protection for the latest VMware environment.
NEW Backup Exec predictive recovery automatically triggers an application restore with Backup Exec for any applications it is monitoring and unable to remediate failure. Symantec Backup Exec integrated with Symantec ApplicationHA can be managed through VMware vCenter Server.
NEW V-Ray Virtual Machine Validator enables the Backup Exec destination to power-on a virtual machine directly from the backup to certify recoverability through VMware vCenter Server.
V-Ray visibility enables deduplication all the way to the source and across physical and virtual environment for leading storage savings.
Patent pending V-Ray with Granular Recovery Technology allows administrators to quickly find and restore objects inside Exchange, SQL and Active Directory in a simple process.
Backup Exec V-Ray visibility can automatically identify and backup new machines added to a VMware environment.
Backup Exec provides broad disk and tape support for storage infrastructures though one console.

Please visit Symantec website for more information.