Netting Out NetBackup

With the one-two punch of an earthquake in the Mid-Atlantic US followed closely by a hurricane potentially hitting the same region, Disaster Recovery is probably a popular discussion right now in the Washington DC area.  Of course Business Continuity professionals write contingency plans for all types of disasters, not just ones caused by nature.  Don’t you want to ask God, or Mother Nature, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster what else we should be planning for, and in what order or combination?  Do you think DC Business Continuity professionals have planned for things like enemy countries parachuting in armies of robotic killer crabs with pompadours and lasers?  What about zombies?  And is there a real difference between planning for zombies or natural disasters?  Well, that’s what I’d like to explore today; the nuances of disaster planning for the zombie apocalypse as it pertains to data protection.

I’d like you to treat...

Having personally witnessed the evolution of data deduplication technologies over the years, I can say that deduplication has come a long way both in terms of maturity of vendor offerings, and end user sophistication. Until about two years back, I used to start my discussions with customers by explaining what is deduplication, what it can do for them, how the deduplication algorithm works etc. Fast forward to 2011, and I rarely have to touch upon these topics. Most users now have a fairly good understanding of the basics of deduplication. What I still find missing, however,  is a deeper understanding of how the power of deduplication can be leveraged in multiple places to solve data protection problems. As an example, many users still swear by virtual tape libraries or target based deduplication approaches for implementing deduplication.  Some users have been sold on the concept of deduplicating data at the source using backup clients. Both of these methods work well in...

In the previous blog in this series (see links below) on Power of NetBackup Deduplication, we talked about two special powers of NetBackup deduplication, viz. how dedupe processing can be distributed and how backups are securely streamed. Now let us talk about two more exciting differentiators. 

Application aware deduplication

The technology in NetBackup Appliances for data reduction is NetBackup Deduplication.  Unlike third party vendor solutions where all backup streams are treated the same way in an effort to identify duplicate data with excessive processing overhead, NetBackup Deduplication understands the backup streams. NetBackup Deduplication uses the normalized stream to identify data type, detect file boundaries and does deduplication with less resource overhead. For example, a backup stream from a NetApp filer coming in ufsdump (NDMP backup) format is identified using a deduplication stream handler that can individually process the file objects...

At the recent NetBackup customer forum, I had the opportunity to talk to some engineers about a very cool new utility called NBDNA – NetBackup Domain Networker Analyzer.  Given the frequency with which network changes, not made by the backup administrator, affect backups, I thought this tool sounded very cool.  The command utility analyzes the NetBackup domain and its configuration for network issues, performance, and behavior. It addresses hostname lookup and connectivity between NetBackup hosts and their role within the NetBackup domain.

NBDNA does the following:

• Discovers and maps the NetBackup domain
• Extracts the hostname memberships by querying the configuration
• Evaluates hostname lookup and socket connectivity to these hostnames to validate their network relationship status according to their domain configuration

NBDNA can be run on a NetBackup master server or media server. It creates and identifies a zip...