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Announcing Veritas Access 7.4.2: NetBackup Deduplication on Access Appliance

bobski_masson
Level 2
Employee

Today (10/1/18) marks the release of the 7.4.2 version of Access.  The new release has several new features, but by far the most important of those features is support for NetBackup deduplication on the Access Appliance. Deduplication targets cost-of-ownership reduction (a key focus for the Access Appliance) with features like support for client-direct data deduplication, and multi-domain global deduplication.

We’ve talked a lot about the Veritas Access Appliance lately—this past quarter we had a record number of them being sold (by a wide margin!).  For a quick refresh, the Access Appliance is a turnkey deployment of Veritas’ Access software-defined storage solution.  It’s a cost-optimized, on-premises storage appliance purpose-built for long-term retention use cases—it provides near-primary storage performance, but with the TCO profile of tape or cloud.  And of course, one of those LTR use cases is being a resilient and cost-effective solution for the preservation of data backups—especially NetBackup backups.

With the 7.4.2 release, NetBackup and Access take “one-stop-shopping” for data protection to a new level: the integration of NetBackup’s deduplication technology into the entire workflow.

How it Works

Within NetBackup, schedules, retention periods, and the ability to tier backup data to different types of storage are defined in policies or storage lifecycle policies (SLP).  Policies define if the data needs to be sent to a single target and/or replicated in different storage types or destinations. For example, an SLP can send backup data first to a high-performance media server, and then duplicate to another media such as an Access Appliance for long-term retention.

When utilizing NetBackup Media Server Deduplication Pool (MSDP) technology, a media server is required to do the deduplication of the data. The Access Appliance’s main role in the path is to store the unique data, fingerprints database, and metadata.  Example data flows with Access data deduplication includes (Figure 2):

  1. Data from clients are initially backed up to an MSDP on a media server where it is deduplicated and stored for short to mid-term retention and is the primary copy. An SLP is defined to duplicate the unique data blocks to the Access Appliance for the second copy.  Restores can be done from copy 1 residing on an MSDP in the media server or from copy 2 residing in Access. 
  2. In this scenario, no MSDP is defined on the media server. The function of the media server is to create the backup image, conduct the deduplication and send the unique data directly to Access during backups. For restores, the media server is needed again to retrieve the data from Access, rehydrate and forward to the client.
  3. The clients create the backup image, deduplicate the backup data, and send unique data to Access. Access holds the primary copy.  This is referred to as client-direct deduplication.  During restores, a media server is responsible for retrieving the deduplicated data from Access, rehydrating and sending data to the client.figure 2.png

     

Figure 2. Examples of NetBackup Data Flows to Access Data Deduplication Pool

 

Support for Multiple NetBackup Domains

Access also supports deduplication across multiple NetBackup domains. Multiple instances of NetBackup protecting multiple clients from different sites, locations, or data centers can use a single Access Appliance for long-term retention (Figure 1).   Such global deduplication can substantially reduce the volume of data stored, helping to increase efficiency and ultimately reduce costs.

Figure 1.png

Figure 1- Example of Multi-domain NetBackup with the Access Appliance.

 

Summary

This new release of Access software further integrates the NetBackup and Access Appliance product families, such that Veritas can provide a single-vendor, end-to-end data protection solution for large (PB) deployments. Maintaining deduplicated backup data from beginning to end greatly reduces network load and target storage requirements. 

If you have an aging data protection infrastructure (*cough*EMC Data Domain*cough*), or just need more space at the lowest possible cost—check out Veritas Access 7.4.2.