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SNW: First Take: Page 9 of 12

In partnering news, archiving specialist Zantaz will join the HDS partner program for ISVs today.

Backup

Symantec is one of a number of vendors retelling their backup stories in San Diego this week. On Tuesday, the vendor will announce a series of enhancements to its Backup Exec product line centered on systems management, email, and virtualization.

Specifically, the vendor has beefed up its Backup Exec System Recovery software, adding support for quad core servers, centralized management of agents across hundreds of systems, and the ability to recover individual emails from specific folders. "Before, you would have had to restore the whole Exchange database server and recover that one file," explains Steve Fairbanks, Symantec's director of product management.

With System Discovery 7.0, Symantec has also added support for VMware's ESX Server and Microsoft's Virtual Server. (See VMware Eyes Enterprise, Microsoft and Microsoft Makes Virtualization Play.) According to Fairbanks, this could prove useful for testing backups. "Let's say you wanted to do testing, but didn't want to tie up physical servers -- now you can test in a virtual environment and go back to a physical environment," he says.

Pricing for Backup Exec Systems Recovery 7.0, which will be available later this month, starts at $1,095 per server, the same as the earlier version of the product. There is a price premium for other upgrades. The centralized management feature, for example, costs an additional $1,495 for up to 500 servers. Exchange Retrieve, the ability to recover individual emails, costs $995 per Exchange server.