Hitachi Protection Platform Backup Appliance Vs Netbackup

[Mallek]

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

[Marianne]

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...

[sdo]

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.

[RiaanBadenhorst]

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.

[Mallek]

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.

[Mallek]

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.

[sdo]

I've not used Hitachi appliances.  But I have used Veritas 52x0 NetBackup MSDP Appliances, and the original Symantec NetBackup PDDO 50x0 Appliances, Exagrid, Data Domain.  I think it always comes down to cost, and risk, and features - but sometimes, simply did you like the poeple.  As for vendors' claims of a super patented dedupe algorithm... well... I have to be careful what I say.  I've never seen better than 6x to 8x post dedupe data at rest shrinkage on average - some occasional sites oddly as high as 12x but very rarely, no matter who the dedupe storage vendor was.  Maths is maths, and comparing bytes with bytes is... well... comparing bytes with bytes... and we need to remember that the single flaw with dedupe is hash collision.  So, the question is how to have the most extremely safe and outlandishly "so safe that it could only occur once in the lifetime of the universe" safe dedupe fingerprint hash algorithm and yet still be the most CPU MHz/GHz efficient possible hash calculation... because you will never get more dedupe through any appliance than the CPUs can actually process... well... dedupe has been around for years now... and I should think that all of the vendors have max'd out their R&D budgets looking for the ultimate fastest and yet still "safe enough" algorithm.

.

See where I said... "you will never get more dedupe through any appliance than the CPUs can actually process"... think about it for a second... the faster the CPU the more dedupe you can do... or... the more CPUs you have... or... a less safe (note not necessarily more efficient) just less time/cycle hungry... then... the more dedupe you can do... and what does NetBackup Client Side dedupe do... well, it gives you more CPUs to do the dedupe hash calcs with... yes, your entire physical and virtual compute estate becomes your dedupe hash calculation engine.  Terrific stuff.

[sdo]

The NetBackup 52x0 Appliances are general purpose general scale MSDP appliances.  The 5330 is a beast by all accounts (but I've not used one myself yet), and you would be hard pushed to build a media server better than the 5330 yourself.  But there is a gap in both directions between the two models.  You could build yourself a faster (than 52x0) smaller (than 5330) MSDP server yourself... or... you could build a larger (than 52x0) slower (than 5330) MSDP server yourself.

Actually, knowing that really the single limiting factor on dedupe performed within any appliance is CPU throughput, then I'm surprised that Veritas don't offer a range of CPUs in their appliances, but then I guess that would only open up a complete can of worms and draw attention to an aspect that basically becomes irrelevant when you enable client-side dedupe.  So, the MSDP Appliance becomes more cost effective (but unfortnately the bean counters can't see it) because you can leverage all those mostly idle CPUs in the client estate.  What this means then is that because MSDP supports client side dedupe then you should be able to effectively process (i.e. backup) more notional backup data per $/GB than pretty much any other appliance.

But then why bother with all of the hassle of build it yourself for Unix sysadmin time, OS license admin time, storage admin time, storage layout admin time, and time spent choosing and configuring the correct HBAs etc.  All that patching and worrying about firmware and drivers.

Is your site so complex so specific that it needs multiple truely custom MSDP builds each highly tailored and thus more ane more custom locked to specific pockets of environments within a larger estate.

Let's face it, the PBBA market is getting bigger and bigger, and more players what a piece of the pie. 

[sdo]

Another great factor of the 52x0 and 5330 Appliances is that they leverage Veritas Storage Foundation internally.  It makes for really really simple re-balancing re-sizing the pool of Advanced Disk and pool of MSDP disk.  Really nice.

Of course no appliance from any vendor can fit/suit all situations, therefore clearly the 5230/5240 doesn't fit all situations, but it certainly fits a lot of them.  You'd be hard pushed to find a situation that a 5330 cannot handle.

.

BTW, I don't work for Veritas and I never have.  I'm just a customer like most others on here.  I've used NetBackup for several years, and it's pretty good most of the time.  Which is about as good a statement as you'll ever get for any backup software, for what is effectively cheap "tier 3" or "tier 4" storage software.  Sometimes I buy their kit, and sometimes I don't.

[RiaanBadenhorst]

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.