Netbackup 7.6 Blueprints - SLP

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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: Summarises the NetBackup advantages

Storage Lifecycle Policies (SLPs) were first introduced in NetBackup 6.5 as mechanism to control the creation, duplication and retention of backups. The idea behind the SLP model is to simplify backup policy configuration by allowing the same rules on where the backups are stored and for how long to all backups with the same requirements.

• Provide a single place to view the storage plan.
• Create a reusable storage plan for similar types of data.
• Duplications to be created automatically, without manual intervention. Duplications are retried as necessary until they are completed.
• Provide additional staging locations, including all supported disk types, VTL and tape.
• Provide additional staging retentions for greater control of image management.
• Rank backup data according to its business value or importance.
• Uses the desired cache period and the data classification to manage disk capacity.

One of the original design concepts behind the SLP model was that backups should be duplicated at the first practical opportunity. Rather than limiting duplications to only running at fixed times the SLP model has relied on prioritization of backups and duplications to determine which takes precedence when storage resources are limited. While this approach is very efficient it is quite complex to operate and has discouraged the adoption of SLPs.

NetBackup 7.6 introduced two new features that can be used to control secondary operations such as the duplication, indexing or replication of backup images and snapshots:

1. Operating windows – these restrict the times at which secondary operations can occur and prevent resource contention issues between primary and secondary operations. The same window can be applied to multiple secondary operations on multiple SLPs.
2. Deferred copy creation – the duplication or replication operation is delayed until the source copy of the image is about to expire. This effectively creates a hierarchical storage model where the image copy is “moved” to different locations at it ages.

Both of these new features reduce operational expenditure by simplifying the administration of the environment and improving storage performance and space efficiency. The ability to be able to control when duplications and replications occur is particularly useful if the resulting traffic travels over shared networks where bandwidth may be limited at certain times of day. It is also important where public cloud storage is used as some cloud providers charge a premium for uploading data a certain times of day. Deferring copy operations also reduces capital cost by reducing the amount of data being stored unnecessarily and thus the amount of storage required.

You can download the full Blueprint from the link below.