Briefly: Symantec published an article and set some components for Backup Exec 2012 end of life; meaning (from my point of view) that Symantec is no longer able to provide Backup & Recovery solutions for the enterprise. For the medium-sized businesses I would have doubts to use BE, especially when SAP is running. Following a short summary how the support for some components look like.
Update: Got a very interesting article regarding BE 2012 and unsatisfied customers – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/28/backup_exec_2012_users/.
The items below are a short summary only, options in Data Protector as GRE, Zero Downtime Backup, Instant Recovery, StoreOnce, etc. are not covered here. For additional details please refer to the data sheets for DP and BE.
All the details from the Symantec announcement can be read here: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH178552
Agent for filesystem backups using BE 2012: Agent for Windows and Linux are available. Agents for NetWare, Solaris or any other Unix system are EOL.
Agent for filesystem backups using DP: Agents available for Windows (w/o W2K), Novell NetWare/OES, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, Linux Red Hat/SUSE/Debian, IBM AIX, SGI IRIX, SCO OpenServer, SCO Unixware, HP Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS, MacOS. Additional operating systems are supported via: NFS/shared disk, CIFS, NDMP NAS filer.
Integration agents in BE 2012: agents available for MS Exchange, MS SQL, MS SharePoint, VMware, Hyper-V and Oracle. SAP and DB2 are set to EOL
Integration agents in DP: Agents available for Oracle, Informix, Sybase, MS SQL Server, MS SQL, MS Exchange, MS ScharePoint, SAP, SAP DB/MaxDB, Baan IV, Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, Solid Database, DB2. Full virtual platform integration with VMware vSphere, ESXi and ESXI server using vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) and VMware Consolidated Backup VM-level support for Citrix XenServer, HP Integrity Virtual Machine, MS Virtual Server, MS Windows 2008 Hyper-V Backup device servers.