Symantec's Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 Promises Proactive Protection For SMBs

November 03, 2009

As recent surveys make it clear that many small and midsize companies are woefully under-informed and unprepared to deal with security issues, Symantec says its trying to reshape the security process away from from the typical "reactive mode" that requires users to actively manage the process."Our charter is to enable customers to run their business, and we'll protect it," claims Susie Spencer, Symantec's senior product marketing manager for Backup Exec System Recovery. Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 is a standalone product, Spencer explained, that can be used with Symantec Backup Exec or on its own.

In practice, what that means is that the new system will automatically run backups based on a configurable list of events, such as an application installation, user log on or log off, and storage size changes, for example. The configuration can be integrated with Symantec's Threat-Con levels, Spencer said.

From there, the system is intended to help businesses recover from any kind of disaster, delivering exactly what backup information is needed, when and where it's most useful. That means restoging to any device, physical or virtual, not just the device that failed. Symantec says it can recover complete Windows systems in minutes and individual files or folders, Exchange e-mail messages, or SharePoint documents in seconds.

Those backups can be copied to secondary disks and FTP servers for offsite archiving.

The latest version adds support for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Micosoft Exchange 2010. A new Virtual Edition is designed to protect virtualizd environments. Users buy a single virtual license, good for one physical or host machine and any number of vertical machines. The product now suppoes VMware Vsphere, Microsoft Hyper V Server 2008 Release 2, Citrix XenServer 6. The product is available now, and Linux support for Red Hat and SUSE is due in December 2009.

Finally, the separate Backup Exec System Recovery Management Solution is a free download for all users of Backup Exec System Recovery 2010. Based on Altiris Notification Server, it allow IT to cntrally manage task across thousands of servers. An edition that can manage Linux servers as well as Windows servers is due in December.

Pricing for Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 starts $69 for the desktop edition and runs up to $3,500 for complete starter kit.