Thoughts from Veritas Vision 2017

Vision 2017, Veritas' annual global conference was recently held in Las Vegas, providing customers, partners and Veritas employees the opportunity to meet and discuss the upcoming year of new releases and capabilities from the Veritas product portfolio.

The focus was on Veritas' strategy to support emerging IT industry direction and requirements. The conference was heavily themed on discussions around cloud adoption and overall product enhancements.

Key takeaways from the general keynote sessions:

• Veritas is not a one stop shop for backup anymore
• 360 Data Management provides a single platform solution for all facets of IT in traditional, hybrid, and cloud data centers
• Customers are leveraging multi-cloud data centers
• Veritas is focused on rapid product expansion and accelerated support for multiple workloads

There were several major product announcements delivered at the keynote address. Here is a summary:

NetBackup 8.1 General Availability (Released on 9/26)

• Cloud Catalyst – NetBackup cloud storage gateway provides 3x better performance than the nearest competitor
• NetBackup now boasts the highest number of integrated cloud providers
• Hyperconverged Infrastructure support (Native Nutanix Acropolis)
• Emerging workload support for Hadoop and MySQL
• Instant Recovery for Oracle Databases
• Accelerator for EMC Isilon
• Enhanced Security via Secure Communications and improved MSDP encryption

NetBackup Appliances

• Flexible Virtual Appliance solutions for Remote offices and Data Centers
• NetBackup 5340 (Rated for 52+ TB/hr & Scales up to 1.92 PB of capacity)
• High Availability for 53XX appliance series
• New consolidated interface enables single pane of glass management for multiple appliances

Cloud Point

• Snapshot based Data Protection for private/hybrid/public clouds
• Supports multiple cloud storage vendors and traditional disk vendors
• Free software demo https://www.veritas.com/content/trial/en/us/cloud-point.html

NetBackup UI

NetBackup administrators have clamored for an update to the NetBackup user interface for years.  Due to the multitude of requests, Veritas is in now the latter stages of UI development, for a possible release in the spring of 2018.  Here are some highlights from the live demo of the new interface:

• Machine Learning based fixes for identified pattern failures
• Intelligent policy scheduling
• Resource balancing 
• SLA notifications

Microsoft Announcement

A joint venture with Microsoft and Veritas announced the adoption of the entire suite of 360 Data Management within the Azure stack. The many Veritas product integration points generated a lot of discussion at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando. Here are a few of the features that have come with the partnership:

• Azure storage integration with data discovery tool Veritas Information Map
• Workload orchestration with Veritas resiliency Platform
• Veritas Access extension to Azure cloud storage

Storage Optimization

A constant pain point for IT departments has always been the hardware purchase and 3-year refresh cycle especially around storage arrays. The Veritas Software Defined Storage model breaks that mold with efficiency, uptime, and constant ease of evolution. Here are the highlights of Access as a product as well as the announcement of the file based software defined storage Access Appliance due for release in early 2018:

• Easily scales up & out
• Ideal for long term data retention
• Built in data classification
• Automated workflow design
• Unified storage controller – Ability to manage all storage from single policy interface

 Information Map

Information Map was delivered to the Veritas community over a year ago, and provided a view into the end user’s data through NetBackup which natively tracked useful file classification information such as:

• Capacity
• File type
• Age
• Usage
• Additional attributes

The announcement around Information Map included 20 new data sources that will be supported over the next several months. These were successfully demonstrated in hands on labs at Vision and included Azure, Google, and Exchange mailbox discovery. 

Overall Vision 2017 was packed with new product announcements and themed with Veritas’ commitment to support IT organizations with innovation and ensure continued support for their flagship products. As a Veritas Platinum Partner, with over 200 technical certifications, Daymark can help you with your current and future initiatives. Please reach out to us with all questions you may have surrounding Veritas announcements and products.