Symantec API to Enable Native Integration with Disk Devices

Data security and storage provider Symantec announced a new API Nov. 14 that offers enterprise developers a way to connect Symantec’s backup software with other companies’ disk drives.

The new interface, called the Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage API, will enable high-end, intelligent disk devices from several different companies to integrate natively with NetBackup, Symantec’s popular enterprise backup and recovery software.

The API, which won’t be released until mid-2007, is based not on open standards but on Symantec’s own intellectual property.

Disk backup manufacturers participating in the formal Symantec partner program to use this API include EMC, Quantum, DataDomain, Copan Systems, Network Appliance, FalconStor Software, Sun Microsystems, Sepaton and Diligent Technologies.

Providing clean lines of integration between intelligent disk devices and backup software has long been a challenge for the industry, said a spokesperson for Symantec, based in Cupertino, Calif. Since major backup applications and standards organizations haven’t yet provided a purpose-built, open-standards API for integration, it has been difficult for intelligent disk backup devices to offer anything beyond basic functionality, the spokesperson said.

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The new API will change this—in the Symantec world, at least—by allowing intelligent disk device vendors to natively integrate with NetBackup to deliver a more functional storage package for customers, the spokesperson said.

“The OpenStorage API goal is to leverage disk-as-disk functionality in the data center,” Mike Adams, Symantec product marketing group manager for NetBackup, told eWEEK.

“This is native integration, as opposed to integration through tape emulation. NetBackup sees all devices as disks; it controls the who, what, when and where of how images are created and duplicated and deleted; the storage device controls the ‘how.'”

Adams told eWEEK that he believes Symantec “has developed a pretty good niche here, and that we intend to exploit it in the marketplace, where there is great need for this.”

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Symantec API to Enable Native Integration with Disk Devices.