Andrew Carnegie built US Steel using vertical integration to maximize efficiency and sideline competition. President Theodore Roosevelt concluded that Wall Street financiers and industry titans (like Carnegie) were more interested in serving themselves than their customers, and worked tirelessly to "bust" up these corporations. A century later we're still hearing the echoes.

In Singapore this week I've been talking with the APAC team and some of our top channel partners. My last blog was about a unified future, where backup is delivered as a platform and not a point product, and the feedback from this trip ties in.

This week EMC let slip plans to integrate Avamar deduplication and backup technology into VMware, raising concerns about vertical integration and vendor lock-in....

For those of you that may have been looking for a blog post last week that didn’t arrive my apologies; I’m sure you all have day jobs that can sometimes prevent you from doing the things you want to do as was the case for me last week. Moving on…there are a variety of new features in Hyper-V 2012 that I want to talk about and today I’ve selected virtual machine replication. There are a number of solutions available today that offer Hyper-V VM replication and I’m sorry to say that currently Backup Exec is not one of them. Truly, all data protection solutions are going to have to transition to thinking virtual first and physical second otherwise there’s going to be no market for them to survive; virtualization is the platform of the here and now even though there will always be some physical asset presence. The Hyper-V sessions at Tech Ed NA covered the Hyper-V Replica topic quite well from a presentation of the feature to a demo. In its basic...

Team Connect, 

On March 6, 2012, we released Backup Exec 2012. This release featured major changes to the user experience that we tested in a three-month beta with 2,300 SYMC partners and end-users. Most of our customers liked the new release because it addressed changes they had been asking for around disk and virtual machine controls for VMware backup and Hyper-V backup in the main parts of the UI.

However, others were not such big fans of the new UI, which isn’t all that uncommon. Change in the early days of a new design can be difficult. For example, when Microsoft changed the ribbon, or whenever Facebook makes a change to their UI, there tends to be a level of frustration at the onset before we all adjust. But if it is a good change, we eventually...

With the upcoming release of Windows Server 2012 being one of the most anticipated events this year it seems only natural to look at Hyper-V 2012 and see what changes are coming and how they may affect Backup Exec. While researching the topics I wanted to cover it came to me that I should start by looking at when Backup Exec first offered support for virtual environments; this took me back to October of 2008 and the release of Backup Exec 12.5. That was the first release where support for virtual environments was offered via an application agent; in this case it was the Backup Exec Microsoft Virtual Agent which has since become the Backup Exec Agent for Hyper-V. That agent has matured in ways other vendors have copied and imitated: from our “agentless” VM backups to our Application Granular Recovery Technology (AppGRT) that was extended into protecting virtualized applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Active Directory and SharePoint that allows you to recover...