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Unlock the Power of your Infrastructure with NetBackup and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

reneecarlisle's avatar
5 months ago

Many customers are looking to modernize their legacy virtualization platforms to cloud-native infrastructures designed for the hybrid cloud.  Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, providing organizations with a comprehensive and consistent platform to develop, modernize, and deploy applications at scale. Kubernetes alone does not natively provide enterprise data protection across all workloads. This is where Veritas NetBackup comes in. 

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, an included feature of Red Hat OpenShift, provides a modern platform for organizations to run and deploy their new and existing virtual machine (VM) workloads. The solution allows for simplified migration and management of traditional virtual machines on a trusted, consistent, and comprehensive hybrid cloud application platform.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization offers a path for infrastructure modernization, taking advantage of the simplicity and speed of a cloud-native application platform and aims to preserve existing virtualization investments while embracing modern management principles.

NetBackup: Data Protection for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

NetBackup offers a modern approach to data protection for Kubernetes that lets you protect your Red Hat OpenShift environment from a single interface. NetBackup automates the discovery, protection, and recovery for all the resources and persistent data within Red Hat OpenShift projects and has recently extended all the supported functionality of OpenShift protection to include Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

NetBackup connects to your Red Hat OpenShift cluster and provides a Kubernetes workload option for backups that are fully integrated within the NetBackup user interface and Restful APIs– making it a familiar and easy experience to protect your Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization environment.

The NetBackup kOps operator is installed with a Helm Chart into a namespace within your Red Hat OpenShift cluster and manages data protection for your namespaces – including your VMs and associated persistent volumes. NetBackup uses an Elastic Data Mover Pod to copy snapshot backups to off-cluster backup media, which can include NetBackup appliances or cloud storage (see Figure 1). With a single pass backup, you have several granular recovery options which gives you the flexibility to recover only specific resources or data. You can also recover to alternate clusters on prem or Red Hat OpenShift clusters in the cloud.

There are 2 types of backups that you can run:

  • Standard Backup– NetBackup initiates a snapshot of an Red Hat OpenShift namespace and provides instant recovery back to the original cluster within minutes.
  • Backup from Snapshot – After creating a namespace snapshot, NetBackup copies the snapshot data to a NetBackup managed data source external to the OpenShift cluster. In this scenario, you can still fully recover the namespace, or granularly recover individual resources or data volumes to the same cluster, alternate cluster or a cluster in the cloud.
Figure 1. NetBackup data protection for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

Enterprise Functionality for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

NetBackup brings all the advanced capabilities you have come to expect for the protection of your virtualized environments to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

Optimize your data protection for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Autonomous Data Protection with Intelligent Policies

Never miss a backup with our Autonomous Data Protection.  Simply set up one or more templates that define your SLA: How often will backups run, how long will they be retained, how many copies of the data should be kept, and where will the backup data be stored (see Figure 2).  Once the SLA information is set up you can determine which namespaces will be applied to that template.  You can associate namespaces with individual templates based on several criteria: Some iteration of a namespace name, a label that has been attached to the namespace as part of your CI/CD pipeline or based on that namespace having persistent data or the existence of Red Hat OpenShift virtual machines within the namespace.

Figure 2. Intelligent Policies.

Optimized Data Movement

As more applications migrate to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, the size of the data continues to grow, adding pressure to complete backups in their allowed window.  NetBackup understands the importance of optimizing the data movement for faster backup and recovery while minimizing the total cost of ownership (TCO).

NetBackup brings all of the following advanced optimization technologies to our protection of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization:

Elastic data mover – A limitation in the Kubernetes open source projects was an enterprise class data mover.  We brought our cloud-native elastic data mover to the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization environment.  Our elastic data mover scales data mover pods up and down as needed to get the greatest scale in the industry to move data quickly for backup and recovery while shutting down the pods when they are not active to eliminate unnecessary consumption of resources (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Elastic Data Mover.

Accelerator – Get a full backup at the speed of an incremental without sacrificing recovery time.

Incremental backups with change block tracking (CBT) – we brought the power of CBT to incremental backups for the fastest incremental backups in the market.

Deduplication from source to target – Optimize your backups by only sending change blocks to dedupe enabled storage target from the source all the way to the storage target to optimize backup speeds, network traffic and storage consumption.

Lifecycle automation – Optimize your SLA protection with template driven policies that will allow you to make optimized copies of your data to different storage targets, immutable storage, cloud storage or even a separate domain.

Fortify your environment from a disaster

There are many types of disasters that can lead to data loss in an environment, but a ransomware attack is the primary concern for most organizations. As a market leader in cyber resilient capabilities, NetBackup provides comprehensive protection for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

Ransomware Resilience

  • Malware scanning – Automatically scan your backup images to determine if they have been infected with malware.
  • Anomaly detection – Quickly identify anomalies that can indicate an attack using our Adaptive Risk Engine.
  • REDLab - Veritas REDLab studies ransomware and malware attacks first-hand with live simulations and joint testing with partners.
  • Immutable storage – Lock down a copy of critical backups with an immutable copy.
  • Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
  • Adaptive Multi-Person Authorization (MPA)
  • Cyber Dashboard – Quickly see your risk level across your entire enterprise estate (see Figure 4).
Figure 4. Cyber Dashboard.
  • Instant recovery – Instantly recover critical namespaces from a snapshot in minutes with no data movement.
  • Granular recovery – Recover individual resource types or individual persistent volumes in the event of a partial data loss (see Figure 5).
Figure 5. Granular Recovery.

Platform Independence

As a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for Enterprise Backup and Recovery for the 19th time, NetBackup provides platform independence for the protection of your Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization environment.  Whether you run Red Hat OpenShift on prem, Azure Red Hat OpenShift or Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), NetBackup can help protect your entire hybrid environment with a unified platform.

Cross cluster restores

Recover the namespace that contains your Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization VMs from your source cluster to an alternative cluster, or on prem cluster to a cloud cluster for disaster recovery.  

Any storage targets

Leverage your existing storage targets for backups.  You can choose disk targets, OST partners, NetBackup appliances, cloud storage, immutable storage or tape for your backup copies.

Centralized data protection

You can bring all the power of NetBackup to your Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization protection without having to be a Kubernetes expert.  Backup admins can use familiar policies and functionality.  This eliminates the risk of having to use unique recovery processes and multiple departments in a disaster scenario, and it avoids a new learning curve for data protection teams.

Summary

Together, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Veritas NetBackup deliver a powerful solution that simplifies management, enhances security and ensures scalability and reliability. NetBackup provides native Kubernetes workload protection with data protected off-cluster that is storage optimized and protected from ransomware with malware scanning, anomaly detection and immutable storage support.  Let NetBackup bring the advanced capabilities you need for your legacy virtualization technologies to this modern hybrid cloud platform.

To learn more about this solution, visit red.ht/netbackup_openshift_virt  and watch the product demo.

Updated 5 months ago
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