There is no Free Lunch

I won't kid you, I've been wrong about a number of things in life. One of the biggest things I was wrong about was de-duplication. I didn't think it would work, I didn't think it was important. Wow, was I wrong.

One of the reasons I thought de-dupe wasn't going to be a huge hit was that I thought the price paid for de-duping the data would be too high. We don't have to call in the Myth Busters to check out that theory. Check out the white paper that speaks to the overhead on backups with PureDisk. Turns out the initial "price" paid for de-duplication is low and gets even lower after you get that first backup completed. Factor in optimized replication and that initial price looks even smaller.

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.