Symantec Delivers Advanced Backup Reporting

Symantec Delivers Advanced Backup Reporting to Enable Service Level Management and Compliance

AUCKLAND – February 5, 2007 – Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today unveiled Veritas Backup Reporter 6.0, an enterprise backup reporting tool that provides IT administrators with comprehensive visibility into backup and recovery operations.

Backup Reporter enables IT administrators to enhance backup and recovery operations, verify backup service level compliance and run backup as a shared IT service. These capabilities are a valuable asset for managed service providers or organisations that need to analyse and justify backup expenditures. Backup Reporter enables comprehensive data management, backup consolidation and reporting of heterogeneous environments which support Symantec’s Veritas NetBackup™ and Backup Exec™ products, in addition to
third-party backup solutions.

Enhancing Backup and Recovery Operations
Exploding data volumes and heterogeneous environments make it difficult for IT administrators to gain essential visibility to accurately report on backup and recovery. Backup Reporter’s centralised reporting view of single or multiple backup applications helps customers to optimise their environment by aggregating historical data to better forecast trends and helps justify the need for critical capital expenditures such as tape drives or additional backup servers and backup media.

Backup Reporter flexibly adapts backup and recovery operations to the needs of the business. To address the variety of key stakeholders within an organisation, from CIO to backup administrator, Backup Reporter allows users to customise the definition of backup success based on the audience need. Furthermore, IT administrators can be proactive in assessing backup operations as all views are hierarchical with drill-down capabilities. To jumpstart the reporting process, IT administrators can select any of the hundreds of out-of-the-box reports available, or can use the report wizard to create a customised report.

Empowering IT to Verify Backup Service Level Compliance
IT administrators are forced to comply with not only internal Service Level Agreements (SLAs), but also, with external government regulations. Backup Reporter puts backup administrators in the driver’s seat and allows them to be proactive about managing compliance with governing policies. It provides them with the ability to ‘prove’ that critical data is backed up and business-critical clients and applications are recoverable within their established corporate or industry backup and retention policies.

Backup Reporter also eliminates the time consuming manual process of creating ad-hoc reporting spreadsheets. Reports can be scheduled and distributed via email, thereby automating a process that can otherwise be prone to error.

“Today’s enterprises face a growing number of challenges in trying to comply with regulatory requirements and management requests, particularly when it comes to trying to achieve a single, centralised view of their backup and recovery operations across multiple, disparate backup applications and ensuring that they have a standardised and repeatable reporting process in place,” said Laura Dubois, research director, IDC. “Backup Reporter is a timely solution to this growing need that helps take the guess work out of trying to comply with regulatory and management requirements.”

Running Backup and Recovery Operations as a Shared IT Service
Backup operations typically operate as a cost centre and are separate from the rest of the organisation without means to relate the actual costs of running backup and recovery operations to executive management. Backup Reporter transforms this process by providing a mechanism for IT administrators to achieve cost analysis, departmental visibility and chargeback. Values for backup and recovery operations can be formulated, assigned and appropriated to specific business units or customers. This helps IT administrators to proactively show what backup resources are being consumed and assigns a value to backup operations that is based on the requirements of the business.

Reports can be filtered by custom parameters that can be designated to meet the company’s needs. For example, backup utilisation can be presented in a variety of parameters such as geography, application, business unit, platform, location and service tier.

The ability of Backup Reporter to run backup and recovery operations as a business also make this product ideal for managed service providers as it easily identifies resource consumption across diverse customer environments and provides usage data which can be directly used for customer billing.

Symantec’s Unique Value Proposition
Together, Backup Reporter and NetBackup deliver a comprehensive data management and reporting solution. This powerful combination provides real-time operational management with core NetBackup (via NetBackup Operations Manager) for day-to-day IT tasks and advanced backup reporting with Backup Reporter for managing backup service levels and compliance. For customers with multiple NetBackup environments, Backup Reporter can aggregate reporting into one centralised view using common NetBackup icons.

Unlike other reporting products, Backup Reporter is differentiated by its open schema giving IT administrators access to all the valuable information captured in the database. Backup Reporter enables data to be seamlessly exported and tailored with custom applications such as financial business systems. Data is made consistent or ‘normalised’ across different backup applications so trending and detailed analysis of heterogeneous environments is dramatically simplified.

“Backup Reporter provides enterprises with superior reporting that delivers premier service level management that today’s enterprise environments demand,” said Matt Kixmoeller, senior director, product management, Symantec. “Backup Reporter empowers IT administrators to be proactive about understanding, measuring and proving backup service level compliance.”

Pricing and Availability
Backup Reporter is available now directly through Symantec or via Symantec’s worldwide network of value-added resellers, distributors and systems integrators. Pricing is based on the number of backup devices (servers and clients) the customer needs to report on and is available from your local reseller.

About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software, enabling businesses and consumers to have confidence in a connected world. The company helps customers protect their infrastructure, information and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security, availability, compliance and performance. Headquartered in Cupertino, California, Symantec has operations in 40 countries. More information is available at http://www.symantec.com

ENDS

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