For most of the last twenty years, NetBackup and Backup Exec were sold by the same company. Both were Veritas products. Both were positioned as part of a continuous portfolio (NetBackup for the enterprise, Backup Exec for the SMB and mid-market). Customers routinely talked about them as siblings: “we use NetBackup for the data center and Backup Exec at the branch offices.”
That’s no longer the situation in 2026. The two products are now owned by completely separate companies with very different intentions for them. If you’re running either one, the comparison you need to make has shifted.
This guide walks through what happened during the December 2024 Veritas split, where NetBackup and Backup Exec each landed, what each new owner has signaled about the product’s future, and how to think about your migration options if you’re affected. It also explains where Zmanda Pro fits as a credible third option for customers of either product.
What Happened: The Veritas Split of December 2024
On December 11, 2024, Cohesity (the cloud-native backup vendor backed by SoftBank and others) completed its long-anticipated combination with Veritas’ Enterprise Data Protection business. The headline at the time was the scale of the deal: Cohesity emerged as, in their own press release language, “the world’s largest data protection provider.”
The detail that received less coverage, but that matters more for this comparison, was what got included in the deal and what didn’t.
Cohesity took: NetBackup, Alta SaaS Protection, and the surrounding enterprise data protection portfolio.
Cohesity explicitly excluded: Backup Exec, InfoScale, and Veritas Data Compliance. These were spun out into a new, separate company owned by the private equity firm Carlyle. That company is called Arctera.
One year later, in December 2025, Cloud Software Group (the holding company that also owns Citrix, TIBCO, and NetScaler) acquired Arctera. Within weeks, Cloud Software Group reorganized Arctera into three standalone business units and announced end-of-life for Backup Exec.
The two products that customers had thought of as siblings for decades were now controlled by two different companies, on two different trajectories.
Where NetBackup Landed: Cohesity, Stable
Cohesity has been explicit since the acquisition closed: NetBackup customers are not being forced to migrate. The company has committed publicly to continuing to develop and support NetBackup, alongside its existing Cohesity DataProtect product. Public statements from Cohesity leadership have used phrases like “no forced migration” and “continued investment.”
If you’re a NetBackup customer reading this, the takeaway is reasonable: your vendor changed, but your product roadmap is intact. The migration question that affects Backup Exec customers doesn’t apply to you in the same way. You should still pay attention to renewal pricing dynamics (which can shift under any acquisition), Cohesity’s specific commitment language at your contract renewal, and the eventual long-term direction of having two backup products in the same portfolio (NetBackup and DataProtect). But there’s no end-of-life clock on NetBackup the way there is on Backup Exec.
The customers who are most likely to consider alternatives to NetBackup post-acquisition are typically those facing renewal pricing pressure, those who want to consolidate from two products (NetBackup + DataProtect) down to one, or those who feel the product roadmap has slowed since the transition. Those are real conversations, but they’re different conversations from the Backup Exec EOL story.
Where Backup Exec Landed: Arctera, End-of-Life
The Backup Exec story is the opposite. After the December 2024 spinoff to Arctera and the December 2025 acquisition by Cloud Software Group, Arctera issued a formal portfolio change notice on January 8, 2026 announcing end-of-life for Backup Exec, the Desktop and Laptop Option (DLO), and System Recovery.
The dates: end of sale March 31, 2026 (already past), end of life April 30, 2029. Internally, Arctera reps are using the phrase “Last Time Buy” — a recognized industry term that signals customers have one final chance to extend their support contract before the product is unmaintained.
The critical detail: Arctera does not sell a Backup Exec replacement. There’s no Backup Exec successor SKU, no in-family upgrade product, no migration path to a Cloud Software Group product line. The vendor’s official guidance to existing customers is to evaluate alternative solutions. Every Backup Exec customer is, commercially speaking, a free agent.
If you’re a Backup Exec customer, the migration question is when, not whether. For the full picture, see our Backup Exec End of Life Complete Migration Guide.
Side-by-Side: NetBackup vs Backup Exec in 2026
| Dimension | NetBackup | Backup Exec |
|---|---|---|
| Current owner | Cohesity (since Dec 2024) | Arctera, part of Cloud Software Group (since Dec 2025) |
| Product status | Active, with public continued-investment commitment | End-of-Sale (March 31, 2026); End-of-Life (April 30, 2029) |
| Successor product | None forced; coexists with Cohesity DataProtect | None. Arctera has no replacement product to offer |
| Target market | Enterprise (large data centers, complex compliance, petabyte-scale) | SMB and mid-market (Windows-heavy, simpler deployments) |
| Pricing model | Capacity- and feature-based; enterprise contracts | Per-server, per-VM, capacity-based depending on edition; renewals require upfront multi-year payment per Arctera policy |
| Migration urgency | None mandated; renewal-cycle decisions only | 35-month window before EOL; practical decision deadline mid-2027 to late 2028 |
| Tape support | Industry-leading enterprise tape | Best-in-class for SMB (LTO, NDMP, MTF, GFS rotation) |
| Typical customer profile | Fortune 500, regulated enterprise, multi-data-center | 50–2,000 employee SMB / mid-market, Windows-centric |
The two products were always positioned for different customer segments, which is why the same parent company sold them in parallel for two decades. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the SMB and mid-market segment Backup Exec served is now being told to find a different vendor, while the enterprise segment NetBackup serves has a stable continuation under Cohesity.
Which one are you running, and what are your options?
Spend 30 minutes with our team. We'll help you map your environment to the right replacement (or tell you there isn't one).
Which One Are You Running, and What’s Your Path Forward?
The right action depends on which product you have and what your environment looks like.
If you’re running Backup Exec. Your move is on a defined timeline. You have roughly 30 months from now to evaluate replacement vendors, run a parallel period, and complete cutover before the April 2029 support cutoff. The move itself is a 60-to-90-day parallel run; what takes time is evaluating, selecting, and validating a replacement, so your practical decision deadline is between mid-2027 and late 2028. Most BE customers end up at one of three categories of replacement: a broader unified backup platform (Veeam, Acronis, Zmanda Pro; see our Backup Exec vs Veeam vs Zmanda Pro comparison), a smaller SMB-focused tool (BackupAssist), or a fundamentally different model like cloud-native DRaaS. Your existing scale and Windows-vs-mixed environment determines which fits.
If you’re running NetBackup. You don’t have a migration timeline. Your action items are renewal-cycle hygiene: pay attention to Cohesity’s specific commitment language in your next renewal contract, model your three-year and five-year cost under Cohesity ownership (acquisition pricing dynamics can shift), and have a contingency plan if you eventually want to consolidate to a single backup product. There’s no immediate pressure to switch, but it’s worth knowing your alternatives exist.
If you’re running both (NetBackup in the data center, Backup Exec at branch offices, for example). Your situation is the most complex. The Backup Exec side requires migration on the EOL timeline. Whether you migrate just the BE side to a new product (and keep NetBackup) or consolidate everything into one new product depends on operational preference, cost modeling, and whether your branch offices have requirements (size, complexity, compliance) that a single product can serve. We’re seeing more customers in this situation move to a single unified product for operational simplicity, but there’s no universal right answer.
Why Zmanda Pro Is a Credible Third Option for Either Customer Base
This is the part where we’re direct about our own product, because pretending we wrote this guide for academic interest would be silly.
Zmanda Pro is a unified backup platform, built for organizations that want predictable per-workload pricing and broad coverage without enterprise-grade complexity. It is a natural fit for the segment where Backup Exec made its name, and scales up from there. Where it fits these specific customer situations:
For Backup Exec customers, Zmanda Pro is positioned as a direct replacement:
- per-workload pricing (one license per server, VM, or workload, regardless of data volume)
- cross-platform support (Windows, Linux, Mac clients with a Linux backup server option),
- broad workload coverage (VMware, Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, SQL, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MariaDB, Microsoft 365),
- published five-year cost on the calculator with no quote gating. For a typical 100-workload environment, the locked five-year total is $81,294 on the Business plan ($94,044 on Business Plus, which adds 24/7 support). A number you can take to your CFO and not have to re-negotiate.
The honest tradeoff: Zmanda Pro does not natively support tape, so customers with tape-dependent workflows need to plan a tape-to-disk transition or keep tape on a separate solution. When you are ready to move, our step-by-step migration playbook walks through it.
For NetBackup customers, Zmanda Pro is a different conversation. NetBackup is built for the largest, most complex enterprise estates, and where you genuinely need that depth, it is the right tool. But plenty of NetBackup deployments run well below that ceiling, and for organizations questioning whether they are paying for scale and complexity they do not actually use, Zmanda Pro is a credible alternative. The conversation usually starts with cost modeling against the next NetBackup renewal.
For organizations running both, Zmanda Pro is most often considered as the consolidation target for the Backup Exec side, with NetBackup remaining in place for the enterprise data center. We’ve also seen full-consolidation conversations where Zmanda Pro replaces both, but those typically only make sense if the NetBackup deployment is at the smaller end of NetBackup’s typical scale.
Compliance posture for either customer base: BETSOL maintains SOC 2 Type II attestation (audited annually by QRC), ISO 27001 certification, and PCI DSS compliance. Zmanda Pro supports HIPAA-regulated environments with BAAs available. All compliance documentation linkable from the Zmanda Trust Center.
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What to Do Next
The most useful single action you can take, regardless of which product you’re running, is to inventory what your existing backup deployment actually does for you and decide which capabilities are non-negotiable in any replacement. That inventory is the foundation for every vendor evaluation conversation that comes after it.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your specific environment (whether you’re running NetBackup, Backup Exec, or both), our team is happy to walk you through it – book a consultation. We’ll tell you honestly whether Zmanda Pro is the right fit before you spend time on a trial.
