Netting Out NetBackup

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Curtis Preston aka Mr. Backup. Curtis works at GlassHouse Technologies and is a well known consultant, author, speaker and expert on the topic of enterprise backup and recovery. His books include “Backup and Recovery” and “Using SANs and NAS”. Curtis consults with some of our largest NetBackup customers and has been a great partner over the years.

Tim) Tell us a little about yourself. When did you first start working with NetBackup and what are you up to now?

Curtis) I started doing backups 15 years ago at a large credit card company.

First I was the backup guy. Then I was in charge of the backup guys.The next thing I knew, I was a backup consultant and I was stuck in it forever!

Here is the second thing I love about NetBackup for VMWare. It's a a little more complicated than part one so hang in there.

This quote comes from an internal forum at Symantec where people can ask questions about our technologies. I saw it and immediately knew I wanted to share it.

If you don't know who George is he wrote the whitepaper on NetBackup VMWare Best Practices.

Here is what he said.

"Competitors can all backup at the VMDK level. We do this as well.

Where we have a significant advantage is at restore time. Anybody can restore a single file from a VMDK backup. The question is what is the exact process for restore?

Because we are able to find (map) and index individual files at backup time, we can restore files directly from a VMDK file WITHOUT having to first restore the...