Netbackup 7.7, AIR, and Cloud Storage

[Malgamus]

In the press release it mentions that the AIR feature is now supported for cloud storage with Netbackup 7.7. I'm curious if anyone who has upgraded has tested this and been sucessful. Also, is the data being sent to the cloud fairly close in size to the locally stored data after deduplication? 

The reason I ask is because we are waiting for the 7.7 release for our applainces. While waiting, I'm researching ways to migrate our current tape-based backups to cloud-based backups for long-term retention. We are trying to keep the cost and complexity of the process to a minimum and want to avoid using 3rd party appliances if possible. If my understanding is correct, the AIR feature would allow us to send data directly from Netbackup to cloud storage while keeping the size to a minimum and without the use of a 3rd party software.

Quote for reference from:  http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20150707_02

NetBackup’s innovative Auto Image Replication (AIR) feature is also integrated with cloud services – enabling businesses to efficiently replicate catalog and backup data in a cloud environment, while efficiently preserving the de-duplicated state of backups.

I appreciate any input on the matter.

Thanks,

Brian

[Nicolai]

My understanding of the cloud connector is that the data stored in the cloud will be non-deduped but encrypted using NBU KMS.

This info was presented to me at the June customer forum in London.

The reason for not deduping data in the cloud  was performance reasons reading individual blocks. 

I took a look in the Netbackup 7.7 cloud admin guide 

https://symwisedownload.symantec.com/resources/sites/SYMWISE/content/live/DOCUMENTATION/8000/DOC8572/en_US/NetBackup77_AdminGuide_Cloud.pdf?__gda__=1440727200_415e0ff175b7de8e5c5a1114399cb321

Take a look at page 10 - section called "About cloud storage features and functionality". unfortunately deduplication is not one of them.

But I do agree with you that the marketing text is looking slightly misleading :-0

[Douglas_A]

So we have tested this with a few customers now, and the results are surprising. WIth generic cloud providers there is not much as stated above, the data is backed up and shipped to the cloud non-deduplicated.

However with Amazon EC-2 you can stand up a virtaul MSDP in the cloud and ship optimized deduplicated data to the cloud and store it there via AIR or standard SLP. 

in our tests the results were very good (compaired to standard data movment)

[Nicolai]

Yes, moving the entire server into the cloud, using cloud storage has recently supported.  

The key message from Symantec was that the system requirement remained. Buying a clod server does not mean you can skip requirement for memory and disk I/O's.

Amazon has server for compute or I/O intensive compute loads. I/O intensive was recommended.