NetBackup 7.6 Blueprints - RD

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The Technical Services team for Backup and Recovery have produced a number of documents we call "Blueprints".

These Blueprints are designed to show backup and recovery challenges around specific technologies or functions and how NetBackup solves these challenges.

Each Blueprint consists of:

• Pain Points: What challenges customers face
• Whiteboard: Shows how NetBackup solves the customer challenges
• Recommended Configuration: Shows recommended installation
• Do’s: Gives detailed configurations suggested by Symantec
• Don'ts: What configurations & pitfalls customers should avoid
• Advantages: Summarizes the NetBackup advantages

Replication Director integrates the power of array based snapshot technologies with traditional backup data management. Replication Director is designed to be the single integration point between primary storage and storage array hardware and backup operations.

Array based backups have traditionally introduced limitations in the backup process. Long term retention can be costly. Individual files or objects are commonly not cataloged and therefore difficult to find. Integration with other backup targets has been problematic at best and sometimes not even possible. Moving data from short term array snapshot storage to longer term storage (e.g. tape) requires manual intervention or custom scripts.

Replication Director solves all of these issues by managing array snapshots, automating replication to any supported secondary and tertiary storage as well as tape creation. Provisioning of replicas, cataloging and granular file recovery are all controlled by NetBackup.

Replication Director uses NetBackup’s proven OpenStorage API to interface with the storage arrays of Symantec’s partners. With the NetBackup 7.5 release, Replication Director provides support for NetApp storage systems. Subsequent NetBackup releases will extend this support to additional primary storage and storage array hardware array vendors and Symantec storage management solutions.

The new options in NetBackup 7.6 include:

• The ability to snapshot block devices on NetApp hardware (feature only works with file system data in this release - NetApp FAS)
• The ability to protect Exchange and SQL data mounted on NetApp NAS using VMware (NAS mounted Datastores)
  • While Microsoft does not support Exchange and SQL DB’s mounted on NAS, quite a few customers are doing it therefore this feature may help a wide range of customers protect their databases
  • The entire Exchange/SQL instance must be installed in the NAS Datastore
• Added the ability to protect Oracle physical servers with databases mounted on NetApp NFS (NAS) Storage
• Makes use of the new SLP Windows feature to allow for better scheduling of the steps after the initial snapshot (SLP Windows are discussed in another Feature Briefing)
• Makes use of the NDMP Wildcards directive
• Policy GUI has more intuitive options for making Replication Director configuration easier and more intuitive

You can download the full Blueprint from the link below.