Written by W. Curtis Preston
Friday, 13 June 2008 23:24
With the release of NetBackup 6.5.2, Symantec has created a new watershed event: they have released (to my knowledge) the first mainstream backup features that require disk to use them. Click Read More to learn more.
NetBackup released Puredisk a while ago, and that was obviously a disk-only backup product. But that is a product designed for the remote office, so I'm not putting it in the "mainstream" category.
With 6.5.2 (released a few days ago), and 6.5.3 (due soon), they have released features for Sharepoint and Exchange that require disk. Specifically, they finally have the ability to perform a single information store backup, and still do granular restore. With Exchange, that means no more mailbox (AKA "brick level") backups in order to be able to restore mailboxes or messages. They can (once 6.5.3 comes out) extrapolate mailboxes and messages from the information store backup, without having to do a separate backup. The same is true of Sharepoint (in the current releas, 6.5.2). They can perform a single backup of the entire Sharepoint server, while still being able to restore individual elements, such as documents.
Both of these features are very welcome, but it's interesting that in order for them to work, the backups must be sent to a disk storage unit, or open storage (OST) storage unit. Backing up to tape or VTL won't cut it.
That's interesting, don't you think? It's an important point in backup history, as far as I can see. It sure is a sign of the times.
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Why are we many years into VTL deployments and I'm still explaining to people at Symantec why anyone would want one?
Peter E
You stage to a VTL and rolloff to a dedupe device. You can set different retention times on the image written to the VTL and to the dedupe device.
And if you want to avoid buying two different disk arrays, you look into SharedDisk another new feature in NetBackup which might meet your needs.
Finally, why do you want a VTL anyway (unless you have a lot of large NDMP backups).
There is an excellent whitepaper on the new disk features here
www.symantec.com/business/products/whitepapers.jsp?pcid=pcat_storage&pvid=2_1
I believe that NetApp can dedupe a LUN and pass back the savings through LUN thin provisioning.
See paragraph 7.1 of:
http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3428.pdf
Regards,
Joe
(OK, actually one vendor does, as you can hand a LUN-based filesystem to Puredisk and have it dedupe anything sent to it, but the performance of that is similar to NAS, from what I've seen.)
I'll be happy to find out otherwise.
You are very astute sir, I do indeed work for Seagate but in the UK but I am not suggesting for a minute that people wouldn't want to buy anything else - I'm not that naive as to think that our product fits all sizes - and again you are right in that we play in the remote and lower enterprise space and are only now starting to move up to larger organisations.
On the de-dupe stuff - I think it depends on peoples definition of de-duplication. Our delta pro technology on the client end is just backing up the blocks that have changed which is not my understanding of de-dupication - so maybe the VTL vendors who are calling it de-dupe are jumping on that bandwagon because it's a hot topic. Our software does proper de-duplication during it's weekly optimisation process with the sole intent of reducing the amount of storage you require to store the backup and not to try and make the backup faster (we already do that by just backing up the blocks and by using the patented Quick File Scan to identify the changed files)- so maybe that explains why we don't call it de-dupe at the source.
I perfectly understand what you are saying about inertia/familiarity - I worked for VERITAS for 4.5 years and met lots of people who hated BUE/NBU but who wouldn't change becuase they couldn't be bothered to learn something new and it's also very hard to go back to the board and try and explain why the $1m spend on NBU and a SL8500 library is now not what you need and you want to throw it away - it'll take some time yet before that happens wholesale.
On the speed issue - I don't have a specific answer to your question but watch this space
I do agree regarding high speed tape copy - our support for this is not very good but then we are selling to people who like us believe there is no need for tape. I would be interested to know why some people still "need" to use tape when a disc is cheaper, more reliable, reusable, doesn't need to be put on a van to move the data (which in itself injects a lot of potential hazards)- I have had the power objections to disc sitting there spinning but the likes of Nexsan are helping negate that one.
Thanks also for the debate - I'm not questioning you as such just trying to gain more understanding of a subject that you obviously know a lot about.
Cheers
Adrian
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