Symantec has blended its Windows security application with the popular backup software from its Veritas acquisition to offer customers a continuous data protection (CDP) package.

Officials for the security and data management software maker said the new Backup Exec 10d and Symantec LiveState Recovery applications ensure secure disk-based backup and recovery from any point in time, regardless of the equipment used.

The capability is becoming increasingly important at a time when anything from malicious threats, viruses and worms to outages, failures and natural disasters threaten to destroy important data. When one of those events strikes, corporate customers could face the problem of lost files at a time when a growing number of regulations require that data be kept safe and secure.

Symantec President Gary Bloom said Symantec's goal is to treat data availability and security as though they go hand an hand, something the company has preached since agreeing to buy Veritas last year.

"The reason you need both availability and security is that what you're trying to do in most corporations today is open up their systems and make them accessible and usable by the outside world and by employees," Bloom said at the product launch.

With the new Backup Exec 10d software, changes to files are continuously transmitted to the protection server, removing the backup window, said Jeremy Burton, senior vice president of Symantec's data management group. The backup server stores data on disk in its native form so that users can access and recover files with a Web browser.

Burton said that with data volumes rising by as much as 50 percent per year, administrators have more data to manage, with less time to do routine system maintenance. Backup Exec 10d and LiveState Recovery 6.0 allow shops using Windows to quickly recover files, e-mail, databases and Windows systems for any computer.

In a demonstration of Backup Exec 10d, Burton and other Symantec officials showed data being lost and recovered with Backup Exec 10d in minutes, much quicker than the time it took to call the Symantec IT help hotline and grab a technical staffer to recover the files.

Because saving data from an application or computer system from a malicious threat, natural disaster or failure is key, LiveState Recovery 6.0 has a restore anywhere option that allows IT administrators to recover any Windows server or desktop to any other Windows server or desktop, independent of hardware configuration.

This eliminates the need and cost of having to ensure that identical hardware is available in the event of a disaster. Moreover, LiveState Recovery Manager 6.0 now integrates with Backup Exec to help IT administrators protect system recovery points and move them to tape for storage off site.

In a demonstration of how LiveState Recovery works with Backup Exec 10d, Steve Fairbanks, director of product management for Symantec's enterprise management applications, made a change to a file on an IBM file server.

The server overheated and blew up, with smoke billowing.

Fairbanks and Symantec officials replaced the useless husk of an IBM server with a Dell server that was configured completely differently from the IBM server. Fairbanks popped in a disk and the combination of Backup Exec 10d and the LiveState Recovery software were used to almost instantly recall the changed file.

CDP has in recent months become one of the most hotly contested areas of the storage market, with vendors like IBM, Microsoft, EMC and a raft of startups peppering the high-tech landscape with different approaches. Microsoft is expected to officially launch its Data Protection Manager, which offers near-CDP capabilities, at a press event here at 6 p.m. EDT.

Storage analysts are high on the disk-based technology.

CDP provides "much better RPOs [recovery point objectives], which means when you recover, you can recover data that is much fresher than the typical 'last night at midnight' backup," said Enterprise Strategy Group founder and senior analyst Steve Duplessie.

Symantec believes its new CDP approach will win because, as Bloom said in his closing remarks, it is "better, faster and cheaper" than what the competition is currently offering.