In the Symantec official blog “A Vision for Converged Backup Infrastructure” published late last year, Matt Cain announced the upcoming availability of our next generation converged backup platform, the NetBackup 5330 appliance. The 5330 is an integrated media server and storage system designed to deliver high performance, scalable capacity, and resiliency to address the most aggressive backup and recovery objectives in the data center. As an integrated backup appliance, it addresses the OpEx and CapEx challenges organizations face today while laying the groundwork for a modernized data center.
In preparation for this event, NetBackup 7.6.1 was released earlier this month to supply the necessary enhancements to make this platform really sing. In particular, our intelligent deduplication technology (MSDP) has been turbo-charged to support the larger dedupe pools that will now be possible with 229TB of raw 5330 capacity. While we were at it, we hardened our MSDP catalog to heal itself, and added a number of other enhancements that might come in handy even if you don’t have a NetBackup appliance. The nitty-gritty details can be found in the 7.6.1 Release Notes, but if you’re just curious here are the highlights:
New in NetBackup 7.6.1
Intelligent Deduplication (MSDP)
- Improved performance and scalability in very large environments, required to support the NetBackup 5330 integrated appliance.
- Support for a 96TB media server deduplication pool on SLES 11.
- Catalog self-healing. Two identical catalog contents are maintained in two different formats in real time, and corruption/loss of the primary copy can be detected and fixed automatically.
- Catalog disaster recovery. Offline protection of MSDP metadata via a NetBackup policy. If MSDP catalog self-healing fails due to total loss of both the MSDP catalog and its shadow, the MSDP catalog can be recovered to its state as it was at the backup time of the restored MSDP catalog backup.
Activity Monitor Usability
- Enhanced Activity Monitor to display jobs in a parent-child job hierarchy.
- Error code hyperlink in Detailed Status to specific page which contains supplemental information about the error.
VMware
- New NetBackup plug-in for vSphere 5.5 web client.
- Enhanced VMware Instant Recovery feature extending proxy server support to any supported Linux Media Server.
- Enhanced VMware protection to data stored within the vSAN datastore.
Other NetBackup Enhancements
- Enhanced file system support for GPFS provides protection of ACLs/Extended Attributes.
- Enhanced security for Java UI login credentials (SSL).
