Author: Jeff Choinski, Consultant
Symantec held their annual World Sales & Marketing Conference July 10-15, 2011, in Las Vegas. This year, they combined the partner training program with their annual system engineer training. It created an opportunity for partners to meet up and trade stories and also hear experiences from Symantec’s SEs.
This year’s main themes focused around the cloud, protecting virtual environments and how Symantec’s products fit into this ever evolving IT environment. Products such as NetBackup for VMware, helping protect a company’s virtual environment using features like Automated Image Recovery (AIR) and allowing for automatic detection of newly created guests to granular recovery and dedupe with their V-Ray product integration are just a few features Symantec has to offer. The “.cloud” product set is now enabling companies to offer backup and archive as a service offering, further maturing their “IT as a service” models, while at the same time improving availability and reducing costs. The appliance offerings in both the NetBackup and PureDisk space are giving organizations a scalable all-in-one solution to protect their data. Symantec has also expanded hardware configurations to the NetBackup appliance, accommodating network environments from 1G to 10G or to support their fibre channel infrastructure. ApplicationHA for VMware adds another level of protection for Windows and Linux VMs by providing a product that is not only guest aware, but application aware. This provides the ability to stop and restart applications when failures occur, instead of the entire VM. Working with VMwareHA, you can restart and recover virtual machines as well, if necessary. The net is you can run more business critical applications in a virtual environment, without having to worry about outages and downtime. Keep an eye out for more releases this year from Symantec with more products that enable businesses to protect their data, move to the cloud and reduce downtime.
