Veritas Launches NetBackup 10 with New ‘Cloud Scale’ Architecture

Veritas has redesigned its widely installed data protection and recovery platform, which will debut with the rollout of NetBackup 10. The new release, revealed Wednesday, will be available March 28.

Veritas created the new cloud-based architecture underpinning NetBackup 10 as the foundation of its autonomous data management vision.

Besides improved support for the latest AWS and Microsoft Azure archive and storage services, Veritas optimized NetBackup’s ransomware protection capabilities. Also, the company is releasing NetBackup 10 with a more aggressive recurring revenue model.

Veritas bundled NetBackup 10 with enhanced versions of NetBackup SaaS Protection and NetBackup IT Analytics Foundations. NetBackup SaaS Protection will be integrated with the NetBackup management console. The SaaS backup support comes from last year’s acquisition of Hubstor.

The SaaS offering currently provides protection for Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams and M365 audit logs), Google Drive Slack and Box. The March 28 release will add full support for Google Workspace including Drive, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and App scripts.

NetBackup IT Analytics Foundations, which provides analytics and reporting, was also previously a separate product called APTARE. Veritas acquired APTARE three years ago. The rebranded NetBackup IT Analytics aims to provide a common view of an organization’s entire data protection environment.

Veritas is offering the NetBackup 10 with SaaS backup and the IT analytics as a bundle. It comes only as a subscription, solutions evangelist Anthony Cusimano told Channel Futures.

Veritas’ Anthony Cusimaro

“In order to get access to those features, you have to be on a subscription model,” Cusimano said. “This is going to lead us to ideally get our customers on the latest version of NetBackup and get them utilizing all of the features we’re now integrating into the product as part of that subscription offering.”

Perpetual licenses will be available, but only with the base NetBackup, not the SaaS protection or analytics features, he said.

New Cloud-Scale Architecture

The new “cloud scale” architecture will enable Veritas’ vision of ultimately providing autonomous data protection. It supports hybrid and multicloud environments, and protects modern, PaaS and SaaS-based Kubernetes managed applications.

Company officials described the new platform during its Veritas Conquering Every Cloud virtual event. The new architecture provides more automation, which enables improved multicloud storage and tiering. Organizations that have expanded their adoption of cloud services are now experiencing application sprawl, which created the need to scale the NetBackup platform, Veritas VP of product management Doug Matthews said during the one-hour event.

Veritas’ Doug Matthews

“This is easily one of the most common pain points articulated by customers today regarding protecting and managing their hybrid multicloud data,” Matthews said. “We knew our focus, and more importantly, what we delivered from a data management standpoint, had to preserve the agility gained from adopting cloud, especially at scale in production.”

Fight for Market Share

NetBackup is among the leading enterprise data replication and protection software providers, although it has lost ground in recent years. Veritas ranked No. 2 with a little less than 12% share of the market in 2020, according to IDC’s most recent annual reports. The market leader, Dell, had almost …

… 16% share, but both companies’ revenues declined. Dell was down nearly 7% year-over-year, while Veritas declined about the same amount. Revenue for Veeam, which ranked No. 3 with slightly more than 11% of the market, grew nearly 13%.

Phil Goodwin, research VP for IDC’s infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies group, said Veritas has made progress in modernizing NetBackup.

“IDC predicts in the next five to six years, digital infrastructure will be largely sourced, managed and optimized using intelligent, policy-driven self-driving and self-healing automation driven by application- and workload-aware AI/ML analytics,” Goodwin said. “Veritas’ direction toward autonomous data management and policy-driven AI capabilities is in line with this industry trend.”

Goodwin also noted that Veritas is enhancing its ability to address containerized applications. The company is making a formidable and necessary shift that favors subscription licensing.

“Execution is always an important success factor, but NetBackup 10 has a broad set of new capabilities that address current and emerging market requirements,” Goodwin said.

Autonomous Data Protection Vision

Cusimano emphasized that the new architecture will enable Veritas to use advances in AI and machine learning to deliver autonomous operations.

“When we start to think about the future and where we’re going, we’re really looking towards autonomy,” he said. “We want to be starting to make predictions with our technology and be able to respond to things even before they show up, and look for trends and patterns, behaviors that we find inside of other environments out there.”

The same is true as it pertains to enabling elastic data protection. Building on support for granular data protection of Microsoft Azure environments, NetBackup 10 does so with AWS EC2 instances.

“We can just restore individual files or isolate the threat files in there upon restore,” Cusimano said.

NetBackup 10 will also offer elastic backup and recovery services in AWS and Microsoft Azure, providing agentless backups from snapshots. It has a container-based deduplication engine and provides multitier replication.

The improved ransomware protection comes from the new NetBackup 10 anomaly detection scanner. It will also allow customers to integrate Microsoft Defender or Symantec Protection Engine. NetBackup 10 will offer immutable data protection in AWS, Microsoft Azure or Seagate’s Lyve cloud storage service. On premises, Veritas has certified immutable data protection with Veritas Flex and Flex Scale appliances, Cloudian HyperStore and Hitachi Vantara Content Platform.

Veritas also now has its own cloud-based managed storage as a service – NetBackup Recovery Vault – that just became available in December,

“Recovery Vault provides mission-critical ransomware resiliency as a purpose-built, air-gapped storage tier for backups, while reducing the cost and complexity of using cloud storage from a selection of leading providers, including Microsoft Azure, for long term retention and reliable recovery of backup data,” Matthews said. “NetBackup users can now quickly and securely target a Veritas revision cloud, storage target for their backups with minimal setup in a matter of minutes.”