AST ESM products help clients to `globally` lower backup and recovery costs

AST Enterprise Systems Management (ESM), a division of the AST Group, has introduced Veritas` Global Data Manager for NetBackup, an addition to the Veritas NetBackup product family, which will provide customers with centralised management of all backup and recovery throughout their organisation.

"Today, global companies are struggling to keep up with the vast amounts of data flowing through their organisation," says Martyn Healy, MD of AST ESM. " Global Data Manager allows customers the flexibility of managing data where it exists, while greatly simplifying storage management across the enterprise."

"In many organisations, too often redundant effort, high networking costs and inconsistent ad-hoc backup procedures typify their storage management," adds Healy. "Global Data Manager will significantly reduce backup and recovery costs, improve manageability, reduce risk to crucial business data, increase their data availability and optimise use of their human resources.

Global Data Manager, a new top-level component of the three-tier architecture for storage management pioneered by Veritas, enables users to centrally manage distributed locations called storage domains, consisting of a NetBackup master server and either one or multiple media servers, from a single console.

This new architecture allows administrators to manage all aspects of backup and recovery operations, such as backup policies and device management. Once policy information is distributed, each NetBackup server functions as a completely independent NetBackup master server, even if the network connection to Global Data Manager is unavailable.

Global Data Manager offers enhanced backup server fail-over protection. Since administrators can apply backup policies for all NetBackup storage domains from a central console, they can implement fail-over by simply copying rules from one storage domain into another. Consistent backup policies across the enterprise will ensure that all critical data is protected.

As more backup capacity is needed, Global Data Manager allows organisations to add NetBackup servers without needing costly infrastructure upgrades or incurring additional management costs. An administrator can simply add or manage existing NetBackup storage domains as needed, even at remote sites that may not have locally-based administrators.