The update to version 6.5 will announced at Symantec’s user conference in Las Vegas, Nevada today, and it will ship in the third quarter. Symantec is calling 6.5 the disk release of NetBackup, because it will include an API to allow it to talk better to disk devices, and manage some of their functions.

It will be the first major release of NetBackup since 2005, when by Symantec’s own admission NetBack 6.0 created problems for a decent number of customers.

That is not something that Symantec will want to happen again. NetBackup is a major source of the company’s revenue, and is by far the biggest backup management tool on the market. Symantec quotes Gartner estimate that NetBackup accounts for 43% of the enterprise open systems backup market.

The NetBackup 6.0 problems came about because customers were unaware that the release was a major re-architecting of the backup tool, according to Symantec. As soon as the company began warning customers about this, migration problems dwindled, Symantec says.

But others say the problems were caused by sizeable bugs in the code. Without commenting directly on those claims, Symantec told Computer Business Review that another important step it took last year to put 6.0 on the right track was to release of a maintenance pack addressing some of the core issues.

Now 30% to 40% customers have moved to NetBackup 6.0. That is a normal adoption rate, according Kris Hagerman, group president for data center management software at Symantec.

We’ve been tracking this very closely. There have been no issues for the last six month, Hagerman said.

Well, almost. The [problem] cases are – if you will – flat, they’re almost zero, said Symantec marketing director Matt Fairbanks. You can count the unhappy customers on one hand, said Hagerman.

This is why it is easy to see an olive branch in Symantec’s decision to rework the NetBackup licensing scheme that customers have been complaining about for some years. As Hagerman said, some customers currently need to manage dozens of NBU licenses. NetBackup 6.5 reduces the number of client licenses from over thirty to just three, and – unlike any other major backup tool – introduces an option to pay on a per-TB rather than per-server basis.

Will this also address another customer complaint, which is that the product is too expensive? Symantec is not saying what the prices for 6.5 will be.

Enterprise accounts will get deals that will beat any per-TB prices. For the smaller accounts it could be cheaper. But most of the time when vendors change prices, it’s a net zero – the suppliers are not going to lose money, said Ovum analyst Carl Greiner.

Complex and too-expensive go hand-in-hand for licensing. If you don’t understand how it’s been calculated, it’s going to seem expensive, said John Webster, analyst at Illuminati. Has Symantec fixed the problem? Users will be the judge of that, said Webster.

Asked why it has taken so long to make this move, Hagerman answered candidly: That’s a tough question to answer.

One reason might be that Symantec did not feel the need. One of the Symantec people told me that they feel that they have superior intellectual property and they charge for that value, said Webster.

The de-duplication that has been built into NetBackup 6.5 is based on the same technology that powers Symantec’s PureDisk remote office backup system. Built into an in-band appliance and the NetBackup Media server, it allows NetBack 6.5 to de-duplicate and reduce the volume data center backups made to disk.

Symantec is not saying what the de-duplicated throughput will be. De-dupe volume reduction ratios vary a great deal according to application. While other vendors say that 30:1 is typical ratio, Symantec says its customers have seen ratios as high as 500:1.

This makes NetBackup the first major data center backup management tool to feature de-duplication. Symantec’s arch-rival EMC is promising that it will add de-dupe to its NetWorker tool before the year end.

The volume reductions delivered by de-dupe can make disk as cheap as tape. Another disk-friendly feature of NetBackup 6.5 is the inclusion is the API that will allow better integration with disk devices, and the ability.

One of the most important things this will do is to eliminate any problems with media catalog synchronization after backups have been copied from disk to tape. But Symantec says that the API will also allow NetBackup to manage the functions such as site-to-site replication being offered by third-party virtual tape libraries, and to pool and manage disk capacity.

Symantec first talked about this API last year, when it said that it will be used by all of the major VTL and backup appliance vendors, including EMC, Network Appliance, FalconStor, and Quantum. Now it says that VTLs and appliances that use the API will ship late this year or early next year.

Other improvements to NetBackup 6.5 include the ability to back up multiple VMware virtual machines using one client running on the physical host. Symantec said that unlike other products, one image-level backup of a virtual machine can be used to both provide a complete restoration of that server, and an individual file-level restoration.

Our View:

Long term, the most important feature of NetBack 6.5 is likely to be the disk-friendly API. This will help what was originally a tape management tool adapt to the coming world of disk-based backup, and by Symantec’s open declaration, become the central management tool for a range of backup activities.

Combined with the de-duplication facility, the release will maintain NetBackup as a very competitive product. Provided of course that it does not suffer the same problems as version 6.5.