Petter Sveum, EMEA CTO, Cohesity.
Following the Cohesity acquisition of Veritas Technologies’ enterprise data protection business in 2024, significant enhancements have been made to Veritas NetBackup, which deliver even faster and more resilient backup and recovery in the event of malware attacks or system failures.
This is according to Petter Sveum, EMEA CTO at Cohesity, who was addressing a Cohesity webinar presented in partnership with ITWeb.
Sveum outlined the Cohesity and NetBackup roadmap, highlighting how the acquisition has accelerated evolution and how Cohesity’s Direct I/O architecture is transforming the technologies and reducing complexity through a unified recovery platform.
He noted that organisations face mounting pressure to defend against cyber attacks and recover faster – all while keeping costs under control. “We need to ensure that data isn’t vulnerable, that we can identify threats early and that we can recover fast,” he said. “We are building an environment in which NetBackup and Cohesity DataProtect run on the same platform to enable cyber resilience maturity across the board.”
To turbo-charge data protection, NetBackup is connected directly to Cohesity SpanFS – the web-scale file system that powers Cohesity’s unified data platform. This Direct I/O delivers a modern, secure and scalable platform for NetBackup environments and enables faster recovery, stronger security and a lower TCO, Sveum said.
Cohesity said Direct I/O modernises data protection with three integrated layers: client deduplication at the source, Direct I/O protocol – a Cohesity optimised evolution of OpenStorage Technology (OST) adding inline indexing, replication and SmartFiles views for instant access and secondary data use. It also utilises the SpanFS File system – Cohesity’s patented, scale-out file system to consolidate backup, file and object storage into one intelligent, immutable data layer. It enables simultaneous access by NetBackup, DataProtect and Cohesity analytics services.
He explained that Direct I/O is built for large, distributed environments that demand speed, simplicity and adaptability. It supports a wide range of workloads and deployment configurations. Future enhancements include instant recovery for VMware, TLS 1.3, Isolated Recovery Environments (IRA) and additional platforms and workloads. Direct I/O offers benefits such as network-optimised deduplication at client, and its storage and recovery performance scale linearly. Next steps include evolution to a complete future-proof foundation for analytics, compliance and cyber defence, he said.
Direct I/O was one of a number of key accomplishments in the year since the merger, he noted. Other milestones included launching NetBackup 11.0 with quantum-resistant encryption, adaptive risk engine 2.0 and a new and improved web UI, and launching NetBackup 11.1 with YARA-based threat detection, Freeze/maintenance modes and cross-hypervisor recovery. Helios was introduced to deliver one secure control plane to manage NetBackup and DataProtect, while FortKnox for NetBackup enables immutable, air-gapped cyber vaulting and rapid, confident recovery after ransomware events.
