Backup Exec and NetBackup Teams Unite: Symantec Breaks New Ground While Skirting Turf Wars

Breaking new ground or turf wars? That's the question that crossed my mind when I heard that Symantec combined its Backup Exec and NetBackup product groups into one new Data Protection Group earlier this year. One of two things can happen in a scenario when you merge the engineering teams of the two data protection product market leaders, NetBackup and Backup Exec, into one. You either get outright war where nothing gets done and everything devolves into turf wars; or the two teams put aside their egos so they can take advantage of the new synergies that come from working together and sharing common code. So far, it strikes me more as the latter.

Marty Ward, Symantec's Director of Product Marketing for the Data Protection Group, already points to some of the recent successes as a result of this new team. Shortly after they were combined, the two groups started to leverage technologies that already exist across its data protection portfolio so companies of all sizes can look to Symantec to provide a complete solution.

For example, NetBackup's technology for protecting VMware was ported to Backup Exec so small and midsize businesses (SMBs) could achieve the same reduction in backup and recovery times that were previously only found in NetBackup. On the flip side, Backup Exec's patent-pending Granular Recovery Technology that enables it to do a single backup of a Microsoft application like Exchange and recover anything from single message to the entire database was ported to NetBackup. This kind of internal cooperation is helping to expand the addressable market for these technologies and drive key customer solutions to market at a faster pace.

But at higher level, Symantec is looking to accomplish much more by merging these teams into one product group than just playing nice and sharing code. Instead it is redefining its data protection strategy to provide complete enterprise data protection across virtual environments, remote offices, desktops, laptops, servers, applications and databases.

As part of this, the Data Protection Group is collectively enhancing its focus on disk-based data protection. Right now the worst kept secret in the industry is that every company, regardless of its size, is evaluating using disk in some way as part of their data protection scheme and Symantec is obviously not ignoring this trend. However, when it comes to selecting a disk-based data protection solution, the choice depends on the service levels of your applications, the goals of your organization, and the size of your budget. As a result, companies may end up with an assortment of disk arrays ranging from commodity disk arrays to intelligent disk appliances like virtual tape libraries.

The objective of Symantec's Data Protection Group is to become the management platform no matter what hardware platform you choose. For instance, using Symantec's integrated deduplication and continuous data protection technologies, you can protect data on existing, commodity disk arrays. Conversely, if you have already made an investment in a third party appliance, you can take advantage of Symantec's OpenStorage interface to better integrate and manage the extended features that they offer from the same Symantec software. As an example, both Backup Exec and NetBackup integrate tightly with NetApp's Filers to efficiently backup and recover data from an NDMP Filer snapshot.

Of course, the best data protection strategy in the world is pretty much worthless if you can't recover any of the data you backup. As the final rung in its comprehensive and singular data protection strategy, Symantec centers its approach to recovery on three broad categories: granular application recoveries; local and remote disaster recoveries; and, mission critical application recoveries. While other providers can arguably claim efficient recovery technologies, Symantec does distinguish itself in its patent-pending Granular Recovery technology, which allows for quick recovery of an entire system or individual files, emails, documents and virtual machines from a single-pass image backup of Microsoft Windows, Exchange, SharePoint and VMware servers. This eliminates redundant brick-level backups and shortens recovery times by orders of magnitude.

The Symantec Data Protection Group is creating common strategies, sharing code between products and better positioning its products for its customers. Early indications are that this team has created some new synergies internally while improving the features of the products that it is currently delivering. All it all, it sounds like it is breaking new ground while avoiding the turf wars that such mergers sometimes create.