NetBackup 9 responds to customer requests for an HCI option that they can use in new projects, while simplifying their management to have a solution managed by a single vendor.

Data protection vendor Veritas has announced the launch of Veritas NetBackup 9, the latest version of their enterprise backup offering. While it adds several new capabilities, the big new one is the addition of Flex Scale, a hyper-converged [HCI] scale-out deployment option intended to give NetBackup customers the option of dispensing with HCI offerings from other vendors that had been imported to solve specific problems, and simplify management by making everything Veritas.

“One of the main reasons we developed this scale-out deployment is that our customers asked us to,” said Eric Seidman, senior director of product marketing at Veritas. “We have over 80,000 customers today, with over 9 million users, which leads the market. Our customers have asked us to solve some their challenges. They have used competitor products for scale-out use cases. They asked us to simplify that. The point products make it more complex to manage. They create more surface area for malware attacks and make compliance harder.”

The idea, explicitly, is that Veritas being able to meet these use cases will allow NetBackup customers to pre-empt or reverse the entry of competitor HCI products into those environments.

“It has left a gap for some of our competitors to squeeze in,” Seidman said. “We can now cover their entire enterprise, with a single solution, to provide protection from the edge to the enterprise.”

Flex Scale’s scale-out deployment option provides the advantage  of HCI data protection, the ability to flexibly adjust to demand by just adding more nodes as and when required, instead of having to purchase based on anticipated demand that may not happen, or may arrive earlier than projected. The architecture is based on Veritas’ own validated reference design.

“We learned a lot from competitors – both good and bad – in designing it,” Seidman said. “We looked at areas we thought were weaknesses in their architectures. For instance, we don’t put our internode network traffic on customers’ IP networks. We use a high-performance private network, so we don’t put our network traffic on their network, which some competitors do. That’s an advantage of being later to the market.

“Its operational simplicity is key,” Seidman added. “We autodiscovered workloads before, but we now can operationalize all the user features from provisioning to load balancing to recovery. Customers asked us for this as they move to a more generalized IT environment. They want more of a DevOps environment from us. It  automates all the different types of services. It also reduces the manual mistakes, and ensures customers don’t have gaps in data protection services.”

Seidman also indicated that customer demand for a Veritas homegrown HCI was to fulfill traditional HCI purposes – new projects as new workloads are deployed – rather than to replace existing production environment.

“Customers told us that they mainly wanted this for new deployments,” he said. “I haven’t seen a high level of demand to migrate from a scale-up environment to a scale-out one. Many are quite happy with their installed environments. This is for data centre modernization as they deploy new applications and workloads. Some workloads are best suited for traditional NetBackup. FlexScale’s scale out capabilities, or running natively in the cloud, meet different use cases. We are also the only ones who can now do it all.”

Beyond the HCI, Seidman said that NetBackup 9 expands on what Veritas delivered in 8.3.

“We enhanced capabilities around VMware, and added significant new capabilities in container protection, with native APIs for OpenStack,” he noted. “We introduced support for full backup and recovery in MongoDB 4.2, and enhanced tiering directly to the Azure cloud long-term retention tier.”

NetBackup 9 is available now.