Symantec Will Stop Selling Backup Exec 3600 (BE3600) – Free Hardware to Help
On Friday, Symantec announced that the Backup Exec 3600 (BE3600) backup appliance would be discontinued – Symantec will quit selling it on January 5, 2015. More information can be found here.
Symantec Backup Exec customers have seen a number of challenges over the last few years. Backup Exec 2012 (BE2012) wasn’t greeted warmly by customers, the promised upgrades took a long time to start shipping, there’s been a huge amount of reported turmoil within the Symantec, Symantec recently announced a plan to split itself into two companies, and now this.
At Unitrends, we’d like to help. So effective immediately, we’re announcing an aggressive – our CFO calls it “insanely aggressive” – offer to Symantec BE3600 customers. We’re going to offer a free trade-up from the BE3600 to select Unitrends Recovery-Series appliances – the only thing the customer will have to pay for is a 3-year (or optionally to lock in rates a 5-year) support contract. (And please note that these customers will also get free hardware at the end of their first three years as long as they continue to maintain a support contract.)
Why are we offering free hardware trade-ins when Unitrends is already experiencing record-setting growth? Because we think that people who bought the BE3600 had the right idea – Purpose Built Backup Appliances (PBBAs) are for many customers simply a better approach to data protection than “build your own” software slapped on top of hardware. It’s tougher for vendors to be responsible for all aspects of data protection – but it’s better for customers. We don’t want to see Symantec customers who made the right choice to move to PBBAs have to go back to buying, integrating, monitoring, and managing separate server hardware, storage, networking, operating system, anti-virus, backup, retention, archiving, and other software.
