Symantec Renames Backup Exec System Recovery, Adds Performance And Automation

The changes stem from a need by customers to deal with restoring operations not only in their physical server environments but also in virtual and hybrid physical-virtual environments, said Monica Girolami, senior manager of product marketing for Symantec's Backup Express family.

"Customers need to make sure they can restore data if a system goes down or, more important, can get back up if they have a disaster in a location outside of their main office," Girolami said. "We want customers to be confident that if they restore data, it will be available."

All customers have some type of data backup and restore technology, whether it's Symantec's Backup Exec or some other Symantec or other vendor's product, Girolami said.

"But the big question is, can they restore an entire system?" she said. "Today, they use a very manual approach with new hardware and software. This leads to a lot of downtime. A recent Symantec survey found that the median downtime cost to a business is about $12,000 per day."

One of the tools Symantec provides is Symantec System Recovery 2011, which before this month was known as Backup Exec System Recovery. It restores both physical and virtual servers from local or off-site backup to similar or different hardware, bare metal systems, or virtual machines.

In addition to the name change, Symantec has just added the ability to use a USB storage device as a bootable backup and restore Symantec System Recover disk to cut boot time and speed up the recovery process, Girolami said.

With the new feature, both the system recovery information and the backup data reside on the USB storage device for a single source for recovering systems, Girolami said. "Before, you needed a separate recovery disk and data disk," she said. "We're making the recovery process fast and easy because it's all in one location," she said.

Also new is the option to select an ISO image as the source for a custom recovery disk, Girolami said. That ISO image, based on an industry standard, is a custom pre-configured system image that can be dropped onto new hardware in just minutes, she said.