NetBackup and Enterprise Vault Integration

[Turls]

Introduction

With ever growing volumes of data in typical organizations and increasing scrutiny around management and retention of that data, companies are beginning to seek more cost-effective ways to scale their storage environments. In particular, with email and file server growth, IT administrators are struggling with the challenges of providing high levels of service to users while staying within realistic IT budgets.

Thousands of customers have implemented Enterprise Vault since 1999 for archiving of Microsoft Exchange email, Microsoft Windows or Network Appliance file systems, Microsoft SharePoint documents, instant messages and other content. Enterprise Vault helped address customer challenges in this area by allowing IT organizations to automatically migrate data from primary disk storage locations to more cost-effective secondary disk storage locations, such as serial ATA environments.

Enterprise Vault customers are able to preserve a seamless user experience (so that end-users do not have to change their behavior to access archived data), while ensuring data reduction on the backend through compression and single instance storage. IT organizations have been able to better adhere to internal and external policies around retention and destruction of this data, while providing tools for IT, legal, and end-users to securely perform searches against archived content – for information access, legal discovery and communication supervision.

However, not all customers have a need to keep archived data on disk – even if it is near-line disk such as serial ATA. Indeed, many customers have archived data that is expected to be accessed very infrequently, and tape and other traditional backup media present a compelling and costeffective alternative for long-term archive data storage. Customers are observing that as information moves through its lifecycle of use, its access frequency and performance requirements diminish.

At the same time, customers have already typically invested in a large data protection infrastructure managed by VERITAS NetBackup, including backup media servers, libraries, tape drives, media and management processes. These customers are often reluctant to setup a completely separate environment for managing archived media.

With the release of VERITAS Enterprise Vault 6.0 in July of 2005, VERITAS customers can now have the best of both worlds and meet their business data management needs in a more costeffective fashion. Through integration between VERITAS NetBackup and VERITAS Enterprise Vault, customers are now able to define automatic, policy-based migration strategies to move archived data from disk managed by Enterprise Vault to tape or other media managed by NetBackup – leveraging the same existing backup infrastructure customers already have today.

Integration Overview

Enterprise Vault 6.0 can now automatically and transparently utilize storage devices within a NetBackup 5.1 or higher environment. This includes, inline copies, disk (DSU & DSSU’s), tape (including WORM), and UDO optical (on Windows via the Pegasus InveStore software).

Utilizing NetBackup 5.1 or higher with the Enterprise Vault v6.0 archived items from Enterprise Vault can now be automatically stored and retrieved on storage devices managed by NetBackup. All archived items must be stored within a Vault Store Partition within Enterprise Vault first. Once Enterprise Vault has archived the item, the collection process is run and it is placed into a CAB file. The next step is the migration of the data from Enterprise Vault to the migration process of NetBackup. Enterprise Vault’s migration process calls the NetBackup migration process which starts a backup of the CAB files via a NetBackup Policy. Once the backup is complete Enterprise Vault truncates the Vault Store Partitions copy of the CAB file. This reduces the Enterprise Vault disk storage space and leverages the investments made in the NetBackup infrastructure.

During the NetBackup migration process multiple copies can be made using inline tape copies. DSU and DSSU (Disk Storage Unit, Disk Storage Staging Units) are also supported for migrations direct to disk controlled by NetBackup. It is however highly recommended to keep traditional backups separated from Enterprise Vault data since the retention requirements are most likely to be very different.

Background on Enterprise Vault Archiving

As Enterprise Vault archives data it is stored on disk in what’s called Vault Store Partitions, where it is indexed, and retention categories are applied. The directory structure for a Vault Store Partition is a Year/Month/Day/Hour hierarchy. The DVS (Digital Vault Sets) files are created in the Hour directory based on the creation time of the managed item (using GMT). If the archived item is over 50 Megabytes in size the item is placed in a DVF file and a small pointer DVS file is created. The DVF file contains the data and the DVS file contains a pointer to the DVF file. DVF files are not indexed or compressed.

The Collector allows the administrator to configure the optimization of the Vault Store Partition by collecting the typically small DVS files into a smaller number of larger files.

To read the complete article, download the PDF.

[ashudhoundiyal]

I've a query regarding collection of DVS files into CAB files for migration. I've archived 5 years of data from my exchange 2000 server to EV server. Now I want to retain last 1 years mails on my EV server and migrate older mails then 1 year to my Netbackup server. Now what option I should choose to crate cab files for those mails only which are older then 1 year.

Add to above scenario I've done archival of 5 years data in last 1 month only.

[John_Santana]

Yes, that is what I need to do as well with the current aging EV 9 server.

So how did you end up doing it to migrate the old data from old EV 9 into tape using Netbackup and then restoring it on EV 10 server ?