Twitter & Webcasts

As Tim eluded to in his last post I haven't been writing as much on the blog since I've been out training everyone on all the new data protection things we announced at Vision. I'll keep this one short. First off, I still love Twitter. I've talked about it before but it's especially when I'm not at home or the office (or in front of a computer) that I really like Twitter. And now NetBackup can tweet at twitter.com/netbackup. Follow the blue guy!

Second is a series of webcasts that will be coming up. The first is about how to cut the amount of storage used for backup by applying a technique called just-in-time inventory.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 (MR 2)

I would like to take the opportunity to share the latest status of Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0. In this update, I plan to review the latest maintenance release as well as the latest metrics we are seeing from Support. I will also give a sneak peak on what is coming next from the development team.

Maintenance Release 2 shipped to manufacturing in mid-April. MR2 includes severalfixes for customer deployment, significant improvements in SMB fit, as well as support for a few new releases from Microsoft (Windows Server 2008, Vista SP1.) This was a huge release by the team and it is making a big difference to our customers and partners. One example of the changes we made was around server memory requirements for Small Businesses. In the original 11.0 release, a customer needed 2gbs in order to run our management console. For most customers that dedicated a server to SEP, this was fine. For smaller customers that need to share the server space with other applications, it was a tight fit. With MR2, we have shrunk the memory requirements of our server to under 300mbs. This allows the management server to run on crowded servers.

On the support front, we have also made significant progress. We doubled our support staff in anticipation of the SEP 11.0 release. However, Support case volume has migrated to SEP 11.0 at a faster rate than any previous Symantec Enterprise AV product release. Historical guidance projected 50% of the AV case volume to migrate to SEP 11.0 within 6 months, in reality we reached 50% SEP 11.0 volume within 3 months.