Veritas Backup Exec is a data protection software product designed for customers with mixed physical and virtual environments, and who are moving to public cloud services.

Supported platforms include VMware and Hyper-V virtualization, Windows and Linux operating systems, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Storage, among others.

Backup Exec recovers data, applications, databases, or systems from an individual file, mailbox item, table object, or entire server.

Since the early days of Microsoft’s journey to turn its Windows Server into the world’s dominant client-server operating system, Backup Exec has been one of a handful of technologies to protect it.

Its earliest roots stretch back to the early 1980s when Maynard Electronics wrote a bundle of software drivers to help sell their tape-drive products.

The agent is simply collecting meta data (takes a few seconds) so that Backup Exec can perform granular recoveries directly from storage at a point in the future - no mounting required.

CASO ensures that everything throughout the network is protected by a single system that can be managed from one console[2] and also balances the workload across all Backup Exec servers in the environment.

[52] Multiplexing can reduce backup times when backing up data from non-solid state sources containing millions of small or highly fragmented files, which require very large amounts of head-seeking using traditional mechanical hard drives, and which significantly slow down the backup process.

When only a single job is running, and the source server is constantly seeking at a high rate, the tape drive slows down or may stop, waiting for its write cache to be filled.

These delays accessing data can cause the backup availability window to be exceeded, when multiple servers with slow transfer rates are being backed up one after the other to the tape device.