Symantec has released the latest versions of two of its enterprises backup and recovery offerings, which the company said took two years of 1,600 developers’ time to upgrade.

Backup Exec 2012 and NetBackup v7.5 will ship with several major improvements, first and foremost separate editions of the two referred to as V-Ray. The new branding comes with support for VMware and HyperV-powered virtual machines, on top of the ability to manage physical boxes and all the other enhancements made available with the regular versions.

Backup Exec 2012 offers more automation in the form of ready-to-use backup configurations that are made available via a new UI, as well as more choice. Users can recover datasets or individual objects to physical servers and not just VMs with the 2012 edition, all while taking advantage of what Symantec claims are major performance and utilization boosts.

“We’re taking what was formerly a four- or five-hour backup down to a one minute or two minute backup,” Regan said. “This is not something you can compare to on the market today.”

Moving on to NetBackup 7.5, the platform puts more emphasis on the newly added virtualization support. The Virtual Machine Intelligent Policy, conceived with some help from Symantec’s marketing team to form the acronym VIP, automatically detects, back up and dedupe the data stored on new VMs. It also comes with a consolidated interface designed to enable easier management of multiple – up to hundreds – of snapshots in NetApp environments.

Both Backup Exec and NetBackup are offered up with a whole lineup of other new additions, all designed to compete in a market where innovating has to catch up with competition. For one, Coraid and Veeam launched their own joint backup and recovery solution just last month.