Symantec Backup Exec 2014 tackles data growth explosion and complexity

Symantec has released Backup Exec 2014, a unified solution that protects organisations’ critical data by delivering powerful, flexible backup and recovery across hybrid physical and virtual environments. This latest release builds upon the features and functionalities of previous Backup Exec solutions and introduces new functionality including up to 100% faster1 performance with backups and recovery, Windows Server 2012 integration, optimised visibility into backup and recovery management, extended cloud support and seamless migration and update capabilities.

This latest release enables organisations to easily and efficiently address today’s most critical information management challenges in the midst of the current information explosion. With many companies projecting that their information will grow at an incredible rate within the next year, this free flow of data has created immense opportunity but has also presented challenges; the daunting and tiresome task of figuring out how to back up information and assets across scattered platforms, such as virtual and physical environments, combined with the proliferation of unstructured data, reduced IT spend and server virtualisation, have had significant impact on the way organisations handle backup and recovery. Traditional methods do not necessarily meet the needs and demands of today’s IT departments. Symantec empowers organisations to address the challenges that plague backup and recovery by delivering a single, unified solution that manages complex data sprawl across mixed environments, enabling organisations to spend less time on IT maintenance and more time innovating.

“With Backup Exec 2014, it is clear to see that Symantec has been focusing on user feedback,” said Nick Dalby, technical consultant and Backup Exec Lead at Softcat. “The most favoured features of previous releases, support for the latest platforms and cutting-edge technologies have been pulled together and thoroughly beta-tested to maximise simplicity, yet have the improved performance and robustness to provide a level of data protection that users can have complete confidence in.”

Key highlights of Backup Exec 2014 include:
• Flexibility: Protects mixed virtual and physical architectures in a single solution that backs up to virtually any storage device and achieves fast, efficient, versatile recovery.
• Optimised performance: Provides up to 100% faster and more reliable backup and deduplication performance, including backups of VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines, compared to previous versions of the software.
• ?Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 support: Supports Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2.
• Clear visibility into backup jobs: Status monitoring of backup jobs from a single view has returned. IT administrators can save time and simplify the creation of backup jobs by backing up and managing multiple servers with a single backup job.
• Simplified upgrade/migration process: Traditional, complex and point backup and recovery solutions may at times be inefficient, time consuming, and expensive to manage. Through intuitive wizards and insightful dashboards, Backup Exec 2014 is easy to implement, use and manage - whether upgrading from a previous version or switching from an alternative solution.

Symantec Backup Exec 2014 will be available for purchase on June 2, 2014 through Symantec’s worldwide network of value-added authorised resellers, distributors and systems integrators. Service packs will be released every 90 days and the Backup Exec 2014 Service Pack 1 has a targeted release date of September 2014.