Would you like to share your expericne regarding to Hitachi Protection Platform S2750 Backup Appliance integration with Veritas Netbackup.
What are the pro and cons over NBU appliance ?
Integration methodolgy ..
Thanks in advance
I have not seen any of our customers or anyone on this forum using Hitachi appliances.
Hopefully someone else with experience will comment here...
With any kind of third-party appliance, the main difference is the target-based deduplication vs NetBackup's source and target based deduplication.
You also have with NetBackup appliance the difference that the media server is included in the Appliance and that a single upgrade will upgrade everything - firmware, OS, NetBackup - single point of contact when anything goes wrong.
With NBU Appliance you can enable SAN-based VMware backups as well as SAN client.
The feature differences for each Appliance can be seen in the HCL: https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.000115690
Hitachi S-series:
A.I.R., Accelerator, Accel_NDMP, Accel_VMware,
Granular_Recovery, GRT_VMware, IR_VMware,
Opt_Dup, Opt_Synth, Targeted_A.I.R., WI_Opt_Dup
NBU Appliance (See :NetBackup 5200 Series and 5300 Series - Supported Functionality)
NetBackup Master/Media Server, Accelerator, Accelerator with NDMP, Accel_VMware, AIR, Client Deduplication / Client Direct over Ethernet, Copilot for Oracle, Fibre Transport Media Server, GRT, GRT_VMware, IR_VMware, OST Cloud and Third-Party Plug-in, Opt_Dup, etc, etc...
I've been really impressed with the client-side dedupe to MSDP dedupe pool inside the Veritas NetBackup Appliance. At one customer we have all Hyper-V 2012 R2, and so VM style backups aren't really an option, and so we use client side dedupe, and so for pretty much 99% of the backup jobs the dedupe fingerprint hash-calcs are performed by the client side CPUs (in the blades in the compute chassis)... and it it hardly shows up at all. Very low CPU footprint when spread across 30+ hypervisor nodes each with dual CPU each with many cores. RAM usage is a little higher than plain client, but only a few hundred MB for the duration of the backup.
Hello
I've not seen this appliance in our region so can't comment if its good or not.
Have you used an appliance from any vendor before? Do you have something to compare the Hitachi appliance with? I suppose this is a storage server only appliance so you'll need media servers in front of it. What is the support like from Hitachi? Have you dealt with them before, and how well do they know NetBackup? Its very easy for a HW vendor to simply say its a software problem when something goes wrong. With NetBackup appliance you won't get that, its all from Veritas.
Size and cost would also play a role, appliances come in specific sizes that might not fit your needs.
Many things to consider really.
Thanks Riaan for your comments .
They claim that Hitachi Protection Platform is unique byte differential deduplication technology that makes Protection Platform the only scalable, global, deduplication solution specifically designed for largeenterprise data centers. Unlike inline hash-based solutions that slow backup performance, Protection Platform performs deduplication concurrently with backup and replication processes for the fastest time to safety and most efficient capacity optimization in the industry.
By using NBU appliance we can easily scale capacity and performance as organization data grows then why 3rd party storage appliance.
Thanks for your comments Riaan.
I don't have experience with Hatachi Appliance and that is why, I am discussing here why people want to move to 3rd party appliance instead of expanding/adding NBU appliance.
Understood. As sdo stated below, there are many factors like cost, support, functionality, size, etc. It is actually difficult to compare a netbackup appliance to other devices like the hitachi or data domain because they're not exactly the same.
For instance, if you want to use SAN client, an appliance can do that out of the box. A hitachi / emc would require that you have a linux/solaris media server, something that some customers might not be comfortable with because they only run windows.
IMHO, NetBackup Appliance sizes incremements are too big large for some customers (±50TB at the moment for 5240, 228 TB for 5330) . For some customers that might make another vendor's appliance more suitable e.g. they need 60TB instead of 100TB.
Then there are other features like VM instant recovery, or VM accelerators, that only work on some, and not others.
Ultimately you have to review your requirements and the capabilities (and cost) of the appliance you're looking at.
