News

Veritas Ships NetBackup 5.1

• By Scott Bekker
• 06/17/2004

The release is Veritas NetBackup 5.1. It builds on version 5.0, which was released in December. Major new features in that full release included disk staging, synthetic backups and usability improvements.

New to the 5.1 release are administrative access controls, stronger encryption, support for major applications, 64-bit support and better integration with Network Appliance's popular storage platforms.

Previous versions of NetBackup came with an all or nothing approach to administrative access. Version 5.1 has six preset levels of administrative control, as well as the ability to customize the settings. The product also integrates with Active Directory, Veritas officials say.

Encryption, previously limited to 40-bit and 56-bit, is now much stronger with 128-bit and 256-bit options.

While Veritas supported 64-bit Itanium-based Windows clients in the previous release, the company has added support for other operating systems running on Itanium, including Windows servers and HP-UX.

New support for specific major applications lowers the impact on hosts during backup. Veritas NetBackup can now cause the database or data store in several major applications to pause in order for the product to take a snapshot. Applications that NetBackup now supports for a smoother snapshot operation include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2.

Veritas also added support for Network Appliance technologies within a Veritas wizard for selecting the most appropriate snapshot technologies.

Veritas NetBackup 5.1 is available immediately and starts at $2,000 for Windows, Unix and Linux.