Symantec has announced new recovery updates and platform support for its System Recovery 2011 product, formerly known as Backup Exec System Recovery, for both physical and virtual environments.

Symantec System Recovery promises to provide complete recovery in minutes, even to dissimilar hardware, bare metal, remote locations or virtual environments, to minimise business downtime.

Amit Walia, Vice President of Product Management, Symantec, said, “Symantec System Recovery shortens the recovery time window with new features such as the ability to transform a USB device into a recovery disk and additional flexibility to the customisable recovery disk wizard.”

Symantec’s 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey found that the majority of small businesses surveyed are still unprepared to deal with a disaster.

Similarly, Symantec’s 2010 Disaster Recovery Survey, which surveyed enterprise organisations, found that the time required to recover from an outage is twice as long as respondents perceive it to be.

System Recovery 2011 is a scalable solution designed to centrally manage large numbers of clients from a single management server. The Symantec System Recovery Management solution can now be installed to and hosted on Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit environments

Additional flexibility has been added to the customisable recovery disk wizard with the option to select an ISO image as the source for a custom recovery disk.