Symantec's NetBackup 5000 is a deduplication appliance that can be set up in less than 20 minutes. It works with NetBackup to identify duplicate copies of data before backup, resulting in a 10-50 times reduction in storage and 99% reduction in bandwidth consumption, company officials claimed.

NetBackup 5000 includes support for virtual machines, allowing guest or image-level backup for VMware or Hyper-V, and the recovery of complete images or individual files.

The appliance is expected to ship in November.

NetBackup Cloud Storage builds on Symantec's OpenStorage API to allow backup and recovery to cloud storage services. NetBackup is immediately supported, while a connector for Backup Exec (typically used by smaller organisations) will be delivered later in the year.

Sean Regan, director of product marketing at Symantec's information management group, told iTWire that the company expects support from multiple major cloud storage providers, but the first partner is Nirvanix, which specialises in the enterprise market. The Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network comprises five nodes - three in the US, and one each in Germany and Japan.

"Cloud storage is becoming a reality," he said.

Please read on for information about Enterprise Vault 9.0.

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Enterprise Vault is Symantec's email and content archiving product that features deduplication, compression, retention management, search and discovery features. Version 9.0 adds more content sources, handling among others Exchange 2010 SP1, SharePoint 2010, and Domino 8.5.1.

Mr Regan said the new release means Symantec can offer a unified way of managing information held in various Microsoft data stores.

The Discovery Accelerator feature speeds the process of assembling the required data, eg, by recognising that an email sent to multiple recipients is effectively a single document.

The Enterprise Vault family also includes Discovery Collector, a tool to accelerate the collection of data from unmanaged sources such as individual PCs and fileshares. Mr Regan explained that it works by installing a thin client on the relevant computers, which then creates a 'thindex' (thin index) allowing discovery staff to retrieve relevant documents.

Also new in Enterprise Vault 9.0 is support for Microsoft Hosted Exchange. "Customers want to host their Exchange Server with Microsoft," said Mr Regan, but they still need to apply retention policies. He said the feature works by consuming the journal stream from BPOS, allowing deduplication, retention and related processes to be done in-house despite the use of externally-hosted Exchange.