Introducing Cohesity NetBackup 11.2: Protect more, recover faster

When Cohesity brought NetBackup into its product portfolio, we made a commitment that the platform would not just be maintained—development would be accelerated. 

Since the acquisition, we have sustained a cadence of major releases, each building meaningfully on the last. NetBackup 11.0 modernized the platform's core, introducing quantum-resistant encryption and a rebuilt web interface. NetBackup 11.1 broadened threat detection capabilities with YARA-based scanning, freeze and maintenance modes for compromised environments, and expanded cross-hypervisor recovery. We unified management across NetBackup and Cohesity DataProtect—under a single SaaS control plane (Helios)—and raised the bar on appliance-based cyber resilience with Cohesity NetBackup Flex 7.0.

Perhaps most significantly, we introduced Cohesity Data Cloud for NetBackup: a new architecture that connects NetBackup's proven data protection capabilities to SpanFS™, the web-scale file system at the heart of the Cohesity Data Cloud platform. This integration delivers faster recovery, linear scalability, and meaningfully lower total cost of ownership—without disrupting the workflows that NetBackup customers have built and relied on for years.

Today, we are excited to introduce NetBackup 11.2. This release continues that trajectory, delivering advances across three areas that matter most to our customers: cyber resilience, hybrid cloud optimization, and operational simplicity.

Stronger where it counts: Broader detection, deeper hunting, improved compliance

Ransomware continues to evolve, and so does NetBackup's ability to detect it, contain it, and recover from it cleanly. NetBackup 11.2 extends threat detection across a wider range of backup images, bringing VMs, NAS, and file servers into a common scanning path so that more of your environment is automatically checked for threats.

Figure 1: NetBackup 11.2 adds several new cyber resilience enhancements.

For organizations with long-term retention copies, 11.2 adds deeper threat hunting into archived data. By exposing file-hash visibility inside compressed backup content, administrators can now hunt for threats in historical copies—uncovering risks hidden inside deduplicated or compressed streams.

On the compliance and hardening front, 11.2 aligns backup infrastructure with current security standards including FIPS 140-3 and OpenSSL 3, and introduces STIG-style configuration checks to help organizations satisfy strict regulatory requirements and pass audits with greater confidence.

Together, these capabilities raise the bar on what it means to have a cyber-resilient backup environment—not just protecting data but actively using backup infrastructure as a line of defense.

Cloud without compromise: Faster, smarter, and more reliable hybrid environments

NetBackup 11.2 ensures protection keeps pace wherever workloads run. For cloud-connected environments, 11.2 delivers meaningfully faster backup and recovery performance by using faster cache and private network paths. The result is improved SLA adherence and lower cloud egress and storage costs without sacrificing protection coverage.

Figure 2: New checkpoint restart capability allows jobs to recover from interruptions.

For large-scale cloud and object workloads, a new checkpoint restart capability ensures that massive backup jobs can recover from interruptions without starting over from scratch. For environments running petabyte-scale object storage or large cloud data lakes, this is a significant operational improvement – both for SLA reliability and cloud cost management. For administrators managing deduplicated storage at scale, new MSDP APIs and fingerprint-cache visibility make it possible to tune storage performance across hybrid deployments without resorting to manual, low-level configuration—reducing required expertise and the risk of misconfiguration.

Less work, more automation: freeing your team to focus on what matters

NetBackup 11.2 helps administrators spend less time on day-to-day management and more time strengthening cyber resilience through a range of operational improvements.

Figure 3: Dynamic multi-streaming reduces backup time for large datasets.

Job resilience is significantly improved: critical protection jobs for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and other key workloads can now ride through short-lived service disruptions rather than failing and requiring a manual restart. This reduces the operational noise that backup administrators deal with and improves protection SLAs in environments where interruptions are a fact of life.

For large-scale NAS and catalog datasets, dynamic multi-streaming shortens backup windows substantially—particularly for GPFS-based NAS environments, where single-stream jobs have historically been a bottleneck. KVM and other virtual machine workloads also benefit from more efficient incrementals and parallel restore, reducing both backup windows and large-VM recovery times.

Workload coverage continues to expand: SAP HANA now supports self-service recovery, MongoDB protection is extended, and archive tier workloads can be managed within a consistent protection framework. 

Across all of this, a modern web-first administration experience with richer troubleshooting tools and more granular role-based access controls reduces the expertise required to manage complex environments and gives administrators greater visibility and control.

Figure 4: Cohesity Helios provides unified administration.

Looking forward: NetBackup and Cohesity Data Cloud

Our vision is to progressively integrate NetBackup into the full Cohesity Data Cloud platform— bringing together data protection, security analytics, and data intelligence in a unified architecture. Over time, NetBackup customers will have access to AI-driven threat detection, automated recovery orchestration, and a unified management experience that spans both NetBackup and DataProtect environments, all under the Helios control plane.

We are committed to giving customers choice in how they evolve their data protection estate. Whether you are deepening your investment in NetBackup, modernizing your infrastructure with Cohesity Data Cloud for NetBackup, or evaluating a full transition to DataProtect, there is a supported path that preserves your existing investment and builds on it. We call this our three paths to cyber resilience, and we're ready to meet you wherever you are on that journey. NetBackup 11.2 is another step.