New products include Veritas Information Map, which is built on the company’s new Information Fabric, and Veritas Resiliency Platform, an IT service continuity solution. Veritas InfoScale is an enhancement and rebranding of the old Symantec Storage Foundations.
Sean Forkan, Vice President Central United States and Canada, Veritas
Veritas, which still officially remains Symantec’s information management business, but which is already positioning itself to become a separate company, has announced refreshes to several of its products, as well as a rebranding of one, and two entirely new offerings.
“Some of the announcements provide leading edge capabilities,” said Sean Forkan, who used to run Symantec’s Canadian operations, but whose move over to the Veritas side as Vice President Central United States and Canada was formally announced in late June. “Others are announcements tied to incremental capability, and one is about clarity around branding. All are in support of our broader strategy, to both increase the availability of information, and also to let customers get more insight from the data, so that they aren’t crawling through mountains of information that doesn’t enhance the value of the business.”
Forkan said that the new announcements continue the thrust of changes that former CEO Steve Bennett formally put into place in early 2013, and which continued even after Bennett’s ouster by Symantec’s board last year.
“Bennett did anchor the business where we needed to be, and the separation of the two companies is part of that next level of innovation,” he said.
Forkan stressed that much of the core assumptions that existed when Symantec bought Veritas in 2005 were altered monumentally because of trends in the industry.
“Cyberattacks have changed massively just in the last 18 months, not only in the complexity of attacks but the volume, with 2-3 million attacks per day,” he said. “The volumes of data in information management made it much more complicated as well. We reached the point where being a leader in both cybersecurity and data protection was too hard, so separating should enable us both to innovate at an even greater clip going forward.”
While many of Symantec’s competitors see the company’s still-large market share in its various spheres as prime targets, Forkan said that on the Veritas side, their business is still increasing, rather than in decline.
“If we look at the results, we are growing at or ahead of the market rate in most of the areas in which we compete,” he said. “In particular, in purpose-built appliances, where NetBackup 7.7 is important, we are growing at 3-4x the market.”
NetBackup 7.7 boasts a 30x increase in its cloud performance over previous version.
“NetBackup went from a single-threaded connector to a multi-threaded connector, which allows it to utilize up to 90 per cent of the network connection when transferring data, which accounts for the enhancement,” said Doug Snyder, Veritas’ Regional Product Manager, Information Availability. “We have validated the performance increases through internal engineering tests that we have not published externally at this time.”
NetBackup 7.7 also adds enhanced plug-ins for VMware vSphere 6 and Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as integration with VMware Virtual Volumes, and Intelligent Policies for Hyper-V. New enhancements have been added in NetBackup 7.7 to support NDMP backups of data on scale-out NAS architectures based on NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP.
Veritas Data Insight 5.0 extends unstructured data analytics to support governance across on-premises storage platforms and Box cloud storage.
“One new feature here is automated entitlements review,” Snyder said. “Data Insight can automate the process of user access or entitlements review – a requirement for regulatory compliance. Its flexible query interface can be used for business process integration and third party application and workflow support.”
The Box support is new as well. Data Insight can now monitor and report on file usage and ownership for Box. In addition, all of the benefits of Data Insight are now being extended to cloud file repositories.
Veritas InfoScale, which provides application availability and software-defined storage in the data centre, is a rebranding of Symantec’s Storage Foundations offering.
“It was rebranded to transform the user experience and make it easier for our customers to consume our core storage and availability solutions,” Snyder said.
A streamlining of the purchasing model is part of the rebranding.
“We consolidated from 19 products to four, and simplified pricing by using just one meter, per core, across Linux and Windows,” Snyder said. “We also introduced subscription-based pricing, which is available for 12, 24 and 36 months.
One entirely new offering is Veritas Resiliency Platform, an IT service continuity solution.
“This is a new product, drawing on our deep IP,” Snyder said. “Veritas understands that maintaining IT Business Continuity can be challenging. We’ve used over 15 years of experience of working with some of the largest organizations in the world to deliver this. It provides predictability, automation and simplicity to take care of IT Service Continuity needs.”
Veritas Resiliency Platform brings visibility, simplicity and automation to service continuity, restoring predictability across enterprise IT business services.
“It is delivered in two form factors, a “software only” one that can be installed and managed in the data centre, or in a SaaS model,” Snyder said. “The SaaS offering is offered in collaboration with HP Enterprise, and is named HP Helion and Veritas Continuity.”
The other new offering is Veritas Information Map, Veritas’ first cloud application built on its new Information Fabric technology, that uses metadata from other tools to glean data that gives better visibility into unstructured data.
“This is one of our first products tied to Information Fabric, which increases the visibility of unstructured data from Veritas NetBackup and presents it through an easy to use tool,” Forkan said. “It lets customers make better decisions around risk, and better identify both value and waste throughout their content.”
Information Map’s availability is scheduled for later this summer. Veritas Data Insight 5.0 is scheduled for availability at the same time. Veritas NetBackup 7.7, Veritas InfoScale and Veritas Resiliency Platform are available now.
