Legato Unveils NetWorker 6.0

Promises enhanced NAS/SAN support, improved scalability and availability, and broadened platform support for service providers and enterprises.

by Wayne Kawamoto

Legato Systems recently launched Legato NetWorker 6.0, the company's data protection solution that's designed to meet the data intensive needs of service providers and eBusiness enterprises. According to Legato, NetWorker's new feature set delivers unparalleled backup and restore performance, increased resiliency, centralized and simplified management and greater application and network access. Additionally, NetWorker 6.0 is supposed to seamlessly scale in heterogeneous storage environments using direct-attached storage, Network-Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SAN).

Legato says that NetWorker 6.0 is ideal for service providers that are offering service-level data protection agreements, as well as enterprise customers managing business-critical data internally.

NetWorker 6.0 is supposed to be fully compliant with the open standard Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) and support backup and restore of NAS servers to local or remotely attached tape libraries. This should increase flexibility, reduce overhead costs, and optimize library resources.

Initially, Legato will support NAS servers from EMC and Network Appliance, and the company has plans to add support for additional NAS servers in the future. NetWorker 6.0 with NDMP support should also deliver live, serverless, LAN-free backup when using Legato Celestra Power agents, which may be ideal for 24x7 business environments. Celestra Power is supposed to let enterprise customers perform backup and restore operations at any time without impacting LAN or application performance — eliminating the need for backup windows.

With NetWorker 6.0, Legato says that it extended library sharing to support additional platforms including Windows 2000, Linux, IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX, and Sequent DYNIX. Library sharing should allow a tape library to be shared between a NetWorker Server and one or more NetWorker Storage Nodes. NetWorker 6.0 also supports a new SAN Storage Node that should enable users to perform LAN-free backup and recovery operations.

The new indexing architecture in NetWorker 6.0 promises to improve backup performance, save disk space by reducing index sizes by up to 40% and reduce time spent performing index maintenance. Additionally, the new index architecture may enable new functionality such as cross platform recovery and more granular data retention policies. NetWorker 6.0 also includes a block-level backup and restore capability that's designed to reduce the backup and restore times for systems with a very large number of small files, such as that of a large Internet/Intranet Web server.

NetWorker 6.0 also supports a wide range of clustering products including Legato Cluster Enterprise, Sun Cluster, Hewlett Packard MCSG, Compaq TruCluster and Microsoft Cluster Server. With cluster support, NetWorker should ensure automatic backup and recovery operations in the event of system hardware failures.

"Exponential data growth, continuing advancement of SAN and NAS technologies, and the advent of service provider architectures mean that data protection remains a critical IT concern," said George Symons, vice president of product development, Legato Systems. "Legato NetWorker 6.0 is the only product available with the scalability, platform support, and open, standards-based architecture that service providers and large enterprises demand."

Pricing and availability
NetWorker 6.0 is available now. Pricing is as follows:

NetWorker Server Workgroup Edition for Linux	$1,150
NetWorker Server Network Edition for Linux	$2,300
NetWorker Server Power Edition for Linux	$7,475
NetWorker Network Edition Storage Node for Linux	$2,300
NetWorker Power Edition Storage Node for Linux	$7,475
NetWorker Workgroup Edition for Windows	$1,150
NetWorker Network Edition for Windows	$2,300
NetWorker Power Edition for Windows	$7,475
NetWorker Workgroup Edition for Unix	$4,140
NetWorker Network Edition for Unix	$8,280
NetWorker Power Edition for Unix	$22,425
NetWorker SAN/NAS Storage Node - Network Edition	$2,000
NetWorker SAN/NAS Storage Node - Power Edition	$4,000
NDMP Client Connection	$9,775

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