This week, Symantec Corporation introduced its latest product - Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery. The product incorporates functionality from Symantec LiveState Recovery. As a stand alone product, Backup Exec System Recovery complements Backup Exec for Windows Servers, which is optimized for data protection. But the product seems to transcend beyond the normal "backup and recovery" process.

Organizations have been using Symantec's products for years to recover their systems. But finally, it appears as though they are able to break the barrier of having to recover systems to the identical hardware platform where recovery points were created. Businesses and IT administrators have been after solutions such as this for quite some time. It becomes quite costly to maintain duplicate hardware solely for the purpose of disaster recovery. And as systems fail or need to be replaced with newer equipment, a solution like this can provide peace of mind as it offers the ability to recover a Windows system to dissimilar hardware.

And to help break into the virtualization market, the product's flexibility allows administrators to perform system restorations even if there is no hardware available by restoring recovery points to virtual environments. Does this sound familiar? Some of us call this process P2V, or physical to virtual conversions. And it doesn't stop there. If you migrated your backup to a virtual machine for disaster recovery purposes or as a temporary stop gap measure, the product can later restore the virtual machine back onto physical hardware once available. This process is known as V2P, or virtual to physical conversions.

There are quite a few tools and players already in the P2V space, so it will be interesting to see how quickly and how far Symantec can take this product into the virtualization community.

Posted by David Marshall on July 20, 2006 05:18 PM