Now that the number of snapshots he can take from virtual machines is limitless, Navarro said his backups have "gone from days to hours now."

"It's so much easier. Upgrades to Symantec's Veritas Virtual Control Center have also made it much easier to take snapshots and compress backups from disk to tape," he said.

Navarro also purchased two data de-duplication appliances from Data Domain in order to reduce his overall backup storage requirements.

"NetBackup will always be the traffic cop for backups and we'll just have Data Domain's appliances as the target," he said.

Symantec also announced its PureDisk replication software, which formerly was only available for use in remote offices, is now integrated with NetBackup and available for use in data centers in order to consolidate enterprise-wide backups.

"We can protect petabytes of data now," Ward said. "And, if we're pulling in hundreds of remote offices, we can de-duplicate that data at the client level."

In addition, Symantec said NetBackup now has expanded support for Microsoft applications for granular recovery of Microsoft Sharepoint 2007, Exchange 2007 and Windows Server 2008 for recovery at the file level or single e-mail/mailbox item level.

Having all backups created from a single image, will eliminate the need for running dual backups in SharePoint, Exchange and VMware environments, Ward said.

Symantec offers a five-system NetBackup starter pack at a suggested price of US$3,000. NetBackup 6.5.2 and NetBackup PureDisk 6.5 are available now; NetBackup 6.5.3 will be available in US Summer 2008; NetBackup RealTime Protection 6.5 is scheduled to be available US Autumn 2008.