Netting Out NetBackup Blog

Our passion is protecting your data. Check out news and insights from the Symantec NetBackup team addressing datacenter issues like disaster recovery, deduplication, Windows application protection and continuous data protection.

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  Created: Kyle Drake 01 Mar 2013

  Lies, Damned Lies, and Infinite Scalability!!!

  One of the things that weigh on an IT director’s mind is how he/she can keep up with their company’s growth in the data center. These areas include server growth, application growth, bandwidth and network growth, and just as important, data growth.  In addition, how do they keep all that up with limited budget, both from a CapEx and OpEx perspective?  In the real world, the amount of money spent dictates scalability, because as the items I mentioned grow within the data center and beyond, the cost grows at an accelerated rate.  The reason is because every piece of hardware/infrastructure added affects the growth of the network, storage, server capacity, resource utilization, etc.  It’s like the ripple effect of tossing a pebble into a still pond.   This makes real-life scalability follow the red line in the graph below.  What the green line represents is if the cost per added data center piece always stayed the same, and...
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  Updated: Kyle Drake 01 Mar 2013

  Which DR Strategy is More Efficient: AIR or Sealed Store?

  Providing a sound disaster recovery (DR) strategy is important for any company to avoid the risk of downtime and lost $$$.  Smart businesses usually have some sort of mirroring, replication or clustering technology in place to keep mission critical applications and tier 1 servers up and running and always available.  But what about DR for the customer’s backup infrastructure? Backup and recovery is looked at as a non-revenue generating “insurance” policy for a company, and has no real business value.  That is, until you lose everything and rely on that backed up data to bring your company back to life.  With that sobering thought in mind, should a DR strategy be considered for backups?   If your entire data-center goes down, you’ve lost all your production servers, backup catalog and images if you did not plan ahead for off-site copies of your data.  Many companies do plan, but are still caught up in the old...
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  Updated: Mayur Dewaikar 22 Jan 2013

  It is the Backup Volume, Stupid...

  Data growth remains one of the top pain points for backup admins.  The legacy data protection technologies are not keeping up with the data growth.  To address this problem, many organizations are re-architecting their backups. One of the key elements of backup redesign continues to be data deduplication. Target based dedupe solutions were the early entrants in the dedupe market and a large number of users adopted these technologies over the years. While the target based dedupe solutions do a great job of reducing the data, they do so at the end of the backup cycle. The data essentially travels in a fully hydrated format (non-dedupe) from the clients, through the media server, to the target device where it finally gets reduced. You get great dedupe rates, which solves one problem—storage costs. But wait, how is this solving the backup window problem? Data will continue to grow and if you don’t address the backup volume problem (the sheer volume...
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  Updated: CRZ 22 Jan 2013

  NetBackup 7.1.0.4 (NetBackup 7.1 Maintenance Release 4) is now available!

  I'm very pleased to announce that a new Maintenance Release for NetBackup 7.1 is now available! NetBackup 7.1.0.4 is fourth and final maintenance release for NetBackup 7.1.  It is a cumulative release - which means it includes all previous fixes from the 7.1.0.1, 7.1.0.2 and 7.1.0.3 maintenance releases.  In addition, this release contains fixes to overall 250 issues including most commonly downloaded EEBs, several customer escalations and internal engineering defects. The significant contents of this release are: Server side Auto Image Rebasing for better data locality and improved rehydration/restore performance Resiliency improvements to address common issues and avoid RecoverCR runs as much possible, RecoverCR Lite tool to reduce downtime, Optimized Duplication (Opt-Dup) bandwidth throttling improvements Improved performance of...
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  Updated: espcampeon2010 22 Jan 2013

  New SORT Features for NetBackup

  The new release of SORT keeps pace with the latest NetBackup releases and also adds important new functionality as listed below. Of particular interest is support for NetBackup 7.5 and Custom Reports for OpsCenter.  General Support for NetBackup 7.5 release in the installation and upgrade checklist and custom reports (checklists have been available since 7.5 FA) Support for the Hayward Appliance (made asynchronously available earlier, concurrent with the Hayward release in February) Support for the NetBackup 7.1.0.4 maintenance release in the installation and upgrade checklist and custom reports (disabled until 7.1.0.4 ships) Incorporate updates from changes to all NetBackup compatibility lists (Operating System (SCL) and associated features, Hardware (HCL), etc.) ...
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  Updated: CRZ 22 Jan 2013

  NetBackup 7.5 now available!

  I'm very pleased to announce that NetBackup 7.5 is now available! The marquee features of NetBackup 7.5 include: Replication Director This feature offers a unified, policy-based management of backups, snapshots and replication. NetApp Plug-in for Symantec NetBackup Replication Director” and an hotfix for NetBackup 7.5. Both will be available beginning mid-March 2012. The hotfix for NetBackup will be available on Symantec support web site and the plug-in will be available on the NetApp NOW Site. Link to Symantec support site: http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH182573 Link to NetApp NOW site: https://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/software/ Deduplication This release offers improved deduplication integration, scalability, performance, and stability...
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  Updated: CRZ 22 Jan 2013

  Be aware: The NetBackup 6.x End of Support Life is fast approaching!

  With NetBackup 7.5 now on the horizon, it's time to make sure you're aware of the coming end of support for NetBackup 6.x.  It's hard to believe it will have been seven years since the NetBackup 6.0 release! On October 3, 2012, NetBackup 6.x will reach End of Support Life (EOSL).  This includes ALL 6.0 maintenance packs and 6.5 Release Updates. The NetBackup 6.x EOSL means that in order to continue receiving NetBackup support, an upgrade to NetBackup 7.x will be necessary. Version 7.1.0.3 is the latest available update today.  (The 7.1.0.4 maintenance release is expected to see release in March.  It is expected that this will be the final 7.1 update.) In March 2012, NetBackup 7.5 GA will also be available as an upgrade path. There is no cost to upgrade for customers with a current maintenance contract; however, you may find that additional or updated hardware is needed. Use...
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  Updated: Phil Wandrei 22 Jan 2013

  Symantec Backup Appliances – Integrated and Integrable

  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...
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  Updated: CRZ 22 Jan 2013

  Backing up the Elephants!

  PostgreSQL (commonly referred to as Postgres) is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. It is used by several prominent users including the International Space Station, Skype, Reddit, and Yahoo! In a blog post last year, Backing up the Dolphins, we had announced support for backup of MySQL via NetBackup. I'm happy to now be able to announce the availability of a Postgres Agent for NetBackup, certified and available from Zmanda, our STEP partner and a specialist in backing up open source databases. Zmanda's NetBackup Postgres Agent was developed using the XBSA API provided by NetBackup. The NetBackup XBSA interface allows Zmanda to create, query, retrieve, and delete data objects using NetBackup for data storage. The operations on the objects use the rules...
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  Updated: Simon Jelley 22 Jan 2013

  Information Anesthetic: Taking the Pain out of Backup

  It seems like businesses are looking at modernizing backup like it’s a trip to the dentist: too time-consuming and painful, and always costly! So they end up taking shortcuts, hoping that the cavity of data loss will never occur. But just as advances in dental techniques have taken much of the pain out of these visits, backup is finally experiencing a revolution of its own, thanks to new developments from Symantec. Everyone knows what the problem is – it’s just too complicated. You shouldn’t have to feel like you’re performing root canal surgery in order to make sure you organization’s data is protected, and most importantly can be recovered. But that’s just how it feels when the amount of data that needs to be backed-up is growing so rapidly and as data centers grow ever more complex. The reality is that there are now so many physical and virtual systems crowding infrastructure that the average company has seven separate backup...