Symantec, the world leader in backup and recovery, provides customers the freedom of choice. With NetBackup and Backup Exec, customers are able to choose the form factor to best meet their needs; a software based solution or a fully integrated appliance. Either choice, the #1 backup solution is delivered in the form factor best suited for the customer’s environment.      

An appliance is a fully integrated device; all of the necessary hardware, software, and components are installed and tested in a single platform. Today, appliances are often taken for granted because they are built with industry standard components, and assembled through qualify processes. Consumers expect the appliance to work out-of-the box, and they do.  However, an equally, and sometimes more important consideration is if it is integrable into your existing environment. Does the appliance easily install and interact with your existing infrastructure? Or does it...

Could you obliterate your backup window problems with 100x faster backups?  What if your car company called you up and told you that with a software upgrade you could make your car accelerate 100x faster.  What if the county or province where you live told you that your daily trip to work or the grocery store would be 100x faster in the coming months.  A new feature in the next release of NetBackup is expected to deliver just this type of massive leap in performance. 

Symantec first gave a hint about this feature, which will be called NetBackup Accelerator, back at our US Vision conference in 2011 (read the press release here), where we announced our intention to break the backup window and provide customers with a plan to modernize data protection....

In the data protection world, a number we frequently see and hear are deduplication rates. We hear of dedupe rates ranging from 50:1, 20:1, to 10:1. Recently, I heard someone say that 50:1 is 5 times better than 10:1.  Their fuzzy math made me cringe, and I knew it was time to address this.       

To clarify deduplication rates, we need to examine: 1) the factors that influence deduplication rates and 2) the math. 

Deduplication Factors

Deduplication rates are like automobile miles per gallon (mpg):  Your Results Will Vary. The factors that affect deduplication results are:

• Types of data (unstructured versus structured data) 
• Change rate of data (what percent of data changes)
• Frequency and type of backup (how often are you backing up the data? (i.e. daily, weekly, fulls or incremental)
• Retention (how long are you keeping the dedupe data)

Recently, one of our customers asked me if NetBackup for VMware supports the use of a dedicated data store for snapshots. That triggered this blog.

  Snapshot is great. Among many of its uses, NetBackup employs it to create a consistent point-in-time image of the virtual machine for the purpose of backup. When a snapshot is active, the writes to VMDK files are directed redo logs. At the end of the backup, the snapshot is released and redo log is played back into VMDK.

  The world is less than ideal. What happens if a backup ends prematurely and the snapshot is left behind? Now the redo log grows. What if such situations arise frequently? Now you have multiple redo logs growing in the data store. There are two major issues here.

1. The storage space on data store gets used up quickly, if the data store fills up all the VMs using that data store would be affected
2. The more snapshots you have for the same virtual...