Symantec unveils SaaS storage products

Computerworld - At its Visions 2011 conference in Las Vegas this week, Symantec announced plans to offer its midrange backup and enterprise-class archive software products as SaaS offerings.

The company also announced that its Enterprise Vault 10 archiving product can now be used store corporate social media data, and unveiled the Veritas Operations Manager 4.0 software that's aimed at supporting virtualized server environments.

Sean Regan, senior director product marketing for Symantec's information management group, said the company's upcoming SaaS, or "cloud," offerings are a natural progression for the products, which were first released as software last fall.

In September, Symantec announced two new appliance-based offerings for its backup and data management products, NetBackup, as well as Backup Exec and Enterprise Vault 9.

In January, the company added data deduplication functionality to those appliances.

Today, Symantec said it will release Backup Exec.cloud, for its small-to-mid size customers, and the hosted Enterprise Vault.cloud product this June.

Dan Lamorena, director product marketing for Symantec's Storage & Availability management group, said the company will make three more cloud- or virtualization-related product announcements over the summer - one per month. He offered no additional insight into what those products would be.

Also in June, the company is planning to release a preconfigured Backup Exec appliance that will remove the need for hardware and software integration for small business end users..

"I don't want to set up a server. I don't want integrate it with software. I don't want to test it in my lab. So, just like with Netbackup, I buy the Backup Exec appliance with pre-integrated software and you get one vendor, one phone number, with one sales process," Regan said. "For the dentist's office or a real estate office, an appliance may be too much for them. They may say, 'All I want is backup and I want to turn it on and get back to running my business. That's what Backup Exec.cloud is."

The company also announced updates to Backup Exec 2010

Available today with both Backup Exec and Netbackup is what Symantec is calling its V-Ray technology (a play on the word x-ray), which offers storage administrators a view of backups across virtual and physical server backup environments through a single console.

The V-Ray technology allows individual file recovery even on virtual machine backups and deduplication across both physical and virtual machines, Symantec said..

"Typically, you have to mount and restore all files from a virtual machine in order to find the one file you want," Regan said. "Now you can go in from NetBackup and Backup Exec to restore a single file."

Enterprise Vault 10

Symantec also plans to bring to market self-service recovery and discovery technology for large organizations with NetBackup.