Backup & Archiving Community Blog

In a coupe of days time I will have been looking after Backup Exec in some shape or form at Symantec for eleven years. Sales, pre-sales, regional technical leader and now as Subject Matter Expert. In that time I've known software and that's it, really. Certainly, like any pre-sales guy I could make the hardware do useful stuff but it was software driven.

So what's with backup appliances? Software and hardware in one go. Some time ago Symantec launched the first NetBackup appliance and with a series of appliances now available it seems that the business is going from strength to strength. But It's not like e-mailing a license key or buying boxed product software. There are incredibly slick processes being running in the background managing the logistics and I'm in awe of the people who make it happen. I'm lucky enough to call some of them friends. They do the hard work so you don't have to; but more of that later.

I noticed an interesting tweet today from Rachel Dines @Forester. It quoted Carl Meadows @SungardAS. 

"Common misconception: cloud solves our sys admin problems. Wrong! Cloud requires more skilled sys admins." 

I have been thinking about this a lot lately as I drive down 101 to Mountain View from SF.  Each day someone gets in a fender bender and traffic continues around them. Sure, life is disrupted but it's par for the course. Sometimes car accidents happen. As I drive south I also pass under SFO. Each day 100s of planes take off. The expectation is that these planes will almost never have an accident. They are piloted by highly trained pilot while the car on 101 is piloted by someone like you and me. 

Cars are like servers.  Planes are like Clouds. 

• When a plane crashes the media shows up at the scene, the bloggers speculate....

We have seen some bombastic marketing over the last several months in the data protection space.  One vendor stuffed 26 women in a Mini Cooper, and Veeam called platform proliferation “the next big thing” when they announced intentions to deliver Hyper-V support in December of 2011 – despite it being available for the past three years from Symantec. Let’s cut through noise and look at some of the underlying facts.

Innovative, Established and Proven

•                Over 15,000 companies already leverage Symantec’s Backup Exec for Hyper-V support. What Veeam has announced has been in the market for 3 years with Symantec Backup Exec. 

•                Backup Exec protects over 75,000 virtual hosts (approx 60,...

The Symantec User Centered Design Group wants to inform you of some exciting ways to get involved at the Vision Barcelona (BCN) 2010.  Learn more about our plans and how you can become part of these plans!

If you are using NBU and/or EV as an administrator, then we want to hear from you! Sign up for an activity as soon as possible as space is limited!  Contact Steve Woolley (stephen_woolley@symantec.com) directly with the following information:

• Role and years of experience (NBU and/or EV)
• How you currently use NBU and/or EV
• What you like best and least about NBU and/or EV
• Activity you are interested in

1. Focus Groups

Join us for an engaging discussion over snacks and beverages!  This session is different from others because we are not making a presentation to you. Instead, we want to use this...