Symantec Corp. today announced the immediate availability of a partner-only beta release of Backup Exec 2012 and Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition. Open exclusively to Symantec's global community of channel partners, the beta release will provide partners early access to one of Symantec's market leading backup and recovery solutions and give them the opportunity to shape the final product.

"Symantec is committed to providing our partners with early access to our solutions and ensuring they work closely with us to successfully bring them to market," said Randy Cochran, vice president of channel sales for the Americas, Symantec. "We're excited about the upcoming release of Backup Exec 2012 and encourage our partners to test it out and give us their valuable feedback. With Backup Exec 2012, we're confident that our partners can be the backup heroes for their customers."

The mainstream use of virtualization, Data explosion and a 24/7 business model have created a significant backup challenge for IT organizations. With the release of Backup Exec 2012 beta, Symantec will help eliminate backup complexity through a single solution that unifies virtual and physical, deduplication, and replication while offering a choice among on-premise software, appliance, or cloud delivery models that best fits an organization's needs. No other single vendor provides this level of choice for customers and partners.

"The fragmentation of backup into different solutions for virtual, physical and deduplication has created one of the greatest risks to effective data protection for businesses of any size. A new approach is needed to ensure recoverability, reduce complexity and save management costs," said Amit Walia, vice president of Backup Exec product family. "Symantec is taking the lead to go beyond vendors that can only solve one piece of the data protection puzzle. This is why Symantec is most frequently compared to by other industry vendors that make grand claims to solve the problem, but deliver only part of the promise."

Backup Exec 2012 Partner Beta release will deliver the following benefits:

• Unite Virtual and Physical: Powered by Symantec V-Ray technology, Backup Exec 2012 beta enables visibility across both virtual and physical environments for fast and efficient backup and recovery while eliminating the need for specialized point products. Backup Exec 2012 beta will also provide true single file recovery, deduplication and backup management for VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers in a single product enabling significant storage and management savings.
  
• Eliminate Backup Complexity with a New Administration Console: A newly redesigned administration console will provide users with fast, concise management and monitoring capabilities. The new user interface will also automatically configure the most common and successful policies and settings, drawn both from Symantec's many years of experience and from the Backup Exec community, to allow for quick configuration of systems and protection of data and applications with minimal effort.
• Integrated Disaster Recovery: With bare-metal disaster recovery and Backup Exec's "no hardware DR" built in, organizations will be able to easily recover a failed system to a physical server, or to a Hyper-V or VMware guest. Backup Exec's powerful recovery capabilities enable granular restore of entire virtual machines, single files, Active Directory objects, Exchange Emails, or SharePoint Documents from any single-pass physical, VMware or Hyper-V backup.
  
• Capacity Licensing: New capacity licensing model for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), mid-sized and lower enterprise organizations will provide easier purchasing and maintenance by capacity as an alternative to existing a la carte pricing.
  
• Small Business Edition: In three simple and quick steps, Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition beta will install and configure backups so small businesses with limited IT experience can protect their data with ease. The beta version of Backup Exec Small Business Edition will bundle Symantec's data and system recovery technology into one affordable solution with a single license that's designed specifically for a growing business.

Partner Beta Registration and Availability Symantec encourages its global partner ecosystem consisting of more than 60,000 members to download and evaluate Backup Exec 2012 beta version to experience the product first-hand and see how they can help their customers unite physical and virtual. The beta program is now open for all Symantec channel partners and the new versions will be generally available to the public for purchase the first half of calendar 2012 through Symantec's worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors and systems integrators or directly.