The biggest feature in the releases for me Is the vSnap replication for Spectrum Protect Plus. Why? Because this means Spectrum Protect Plus 10.1.1 can be implemented as a standalone product to protect virtual environments. For longer term retention and offload to tape it makes sense to still offload to Spectrum Protect. Hopefully the offload function is made more elegant over time and integrated into Spectrum Protect Plus as expected.
The replication is ZFS based asynchronous replication. Its very simple to configure via the Spectrum Protect Plus GUI. You setup the storage partnership under backup storage and define the replication in the SLA. You can define the frequency of the replication and if you wish the retention policy to be the same as the source selection here as well.
One of the other key enhancements for Spectrum Protect Plus is the introduction of application aware backups. The two applications seeing the enhancement in 10.1.1 are SQL and Oracle. For both SQL Server and Oracle Database, full restore and Instant Access scenarios are supported. In addition, for SQL server, you can use the log backup feature for continual backup of transaction logs to a specified destination. Support for additional applications will be introduced in subsequent releases.
On first login following an upgrade its obvious to see the enhancements made based on the fact the menu contains significantly more options. The interface is slick, but still needs some work to enable you to interactively drill down into the summary’s, hopefully that comes in the next release.
