Symantec Corp. is a longtime leading backup and recovery provider for physical environments, so it's no surprise that its backup and recovery offering for virtual environments, Veritas NetBackup 6.53, makes a strong showing. This year it received the silver award in our Data Protection category.

Symantec shares standout features with our Gold winner, esXPress v3.1, including varying levels of backup to accommodate companies' different levels of disaster recovery need as well as strong integration with VMware. According to a judge for the category, NetBackup "offers many nice features, including VMware Consolidated Backup; incremental backups, file-level and image backups in one pass." With incremental backups, only changed blocks of data within a virtual machine are backed up and stored. This speeds backup times and reduces storage costs.

The offering's Granular Recovery Technology also targets efficiency. It enables users to catalog and restore individual files and entire virtual machines from a single backup pass, whereas other offerings may require two passes (which requires twice the amount of storage, network and CPU). And because all individual files are cataloged, they can be found easily and recovered via the NetBackup general user interface. Also, NetBackup integrates with other backup technologies, such as VMware Converter for restores and Symantec's PureDisk deduplication, which enables only unique data to be backed up. This deduplication method significantly reduces network bottlenecks associated with the backup process.