Netting Out NetBackup

I’ve lived in a couple major metropolitan areas.   The kind with rush hour traffic so heavy a toddler on a tricycle can make better time.   Sometimes the major arteries have an HOV lane – a golden pathway of asphalt for High Occupancy Vehicles.   My route through Minneapolis has one.   When I lived in New Jersey, I had to endure 25 miles of watching traffic zoom by us poor slobs in the neighboring lanes.   There were times when the force of the air rushing by caused my car to sway.   Popular rumor had it that some of the passenger silhouettes were really blowup dolls.   It’s New York.  Anything is possible and in fact highly probable. 

So what do HOV lanes have in common with backup jobs?   The new disk pool and disk storage unit design in NetBackup 6.5 allows you to treat some of your most precious client backup jobs as cars privileged to drive the fast...

So you are barely meeting your backup window and now you have decided to replace your old LTO2 drives with faster LTO3 drives, or wait, LTO4 is available.  Yeah, let’s go with those.  After replacing your 8 old drives with 8 new ones you are ready to relax and watch things run.  Why is the phone ringing at 2 AM?  Why are backups not finishing within the backup window?  Why are things worse? Too many people assume the tape drive is automatically the bottleneck in their backup environment without making sure that is the case.  Too many people assume there are only two places to worry about performance, the tape drive and the media server bptm buffers.  While these are two places to be concerned about they are not by any way, shape or form the only two places.  In fact in today’s backup infrastructure they aren’t necessarily the first place to look.   If you will bear with me I would like...

Once you're running VMware, new VMs pop up like moles in the game, "Whack-A-Mole." And kind of like the moles, many of the VMs are identical, because they were all cloned from the same gold image. What does that mean from a backup perspective? It means that you're backing up the contents of that same gold image over and over again. These duplicate copies take up a lot of space, and your CFO, if he is savvy enough about data center technologies, will beg you to install some deduplication software (like PureDisk), which will cut your IT expenses dramatically.

Why? Two reasons. First, with PureDisk, you'll only backup one copy of each unique block, rather than multiple copies. The savings on storage from doing this are incredible - we've seen as high as 99%. Next, PureDisk puts less of a load on your ESX server than a traditional client inside the Guest VM does. What does that mean? Lower load per VM per ESX Server means you can put more VMs on each ESx...

We already have 87 customer production days on NetBackup and 145 days of customers running in a test configuration.  Days are racking up quickly as more customers continue install it.  Here's a couple of customer quotes.

"I ran one test Exchange Backup on the Exchange 2007/WindowsServer 2003 R2 box to disk and it ran great.  Then I looked at the restorefor individual mailboxes and emails and it was there--like magic!"

"We are running well in production with a master server – running6.5.3"

"It is the first time I have put a patch onto a productionNBU box the day I received it but am quite pleased that it went as smoothly asit did."