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Synthetic full backups -- licensing requirements?

anthony11
Level 2

I've had a heck of a time getting information about what features require what licenses. Eg., synthetic fulls.  I understand the difference between plain synthetic fulls and optimized synthetic fulls.  The VAR that Symantec wants us to use only will talk to me about optimized synthetic fulls, which appear to require a dedup license and the hassle of using mulitple tiny dedup pools for storage.  If I wanted to do just plain synthetic fulls so that my clients could do one traditional full then incrementals forever, would I still need the "data optimization" or any other extra-cost license?  I understand this means more work on the server side, but on a 40-core system that really isn't a problem.  The VAR won't talk to me about this and is really pushing the dedup license.

 

7 REPLIES 7

Yasuhisa_Ishika
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

Plain synthetic backups does not require additional license. You can use it with severs and clients licenses. No need to purchase data protection optimization or enterprise disk.

Please note that the amout of space plain synthetic full backups aquire is same with plain full backups. If you don't have enought storage space, it is better to use optimized  synthetic backups.

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

 If I wanted to do just plain synthetic fulls..... 

Good news: NO additional license needed.

Just read up in NBU Admin Guide I for basic requirement and steps - start with Synthetic backup (schedule attribute) topic.

Here we see: 

 

Synthetic backups can be written to tape, to disk storage units, or to a combination of both.
 
As you can see - none of these backup destinations require any additional licenses.
 

Chapter 16 of the same Admin Guide is the HOWTO for configuration of Synthetic backups.

Hope this helps.

(PS - As you can see from my badge, I too am a VAR/Reseller/Partner...)

 

anthony11
Level 2

Thanks.  The extreme cost of the "data optimization" license could pay for like 150TB of disk.

 

 

Marianne
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

Just go ahead - config it. You will see it works. Without additional licensing.

Just for fun, invite your VAR to come and see how it works with your current licenses.

There should be other motivation for dedupe licenses, like client-side dedupe and all the exciting features of Accelerator!

anthony11
Level 2

Thanks, Marianne.  Said VAR just keeps hyping the dedup, claims it will reduce traffic and storage by 90%,  and wants me to spend an extra $40k for it.

 

Client-side dedup would be nice, but I'm not sure that it's $40k nicer than just doing incrementals.  It would also be nice to not have to chop the storage into multiple 64TB dedup pool chunks that I'd have to manually map the clients to, with periodic rebalancing.

I was also told that in order to replicate backups from one server to another I would need the dedup / data optimization license, which seems odd to me.  Isn't dedup relatively new?  I would think that replication was possible before dedup.

Accelerator I don't know anything about.

 

 

Yasuhisa_Ishika
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

I was also told that in order to replicate backups from one server to another I would need the dedup / data optimization license, which seems odd to me.  Isn't dedup relatively new?  I would think that replication was possible before dedup.

What this VAR mentioned to is replication with Auto Image Replication(AIR) feature which requires Media Server Deduplication Pool(MSDP) licensed under Data Protection Optimization or AIR compatible OpenStorage(OST) appliances. AIR enables replication across multiple NetBackup domains.

Or they mentioned to Optimized Duplication feature which required MSDP or Opt_Dup compatible OST appliance. Optimized dupliation can only work in single NetBackup domain. You can not replicate data across domain like AIR(if you want, you need AIR).

You may plan to replicate backups without AIR across domains using some other storage-base replication solutions, but I recommend you not to do so as destination NetBackup domain can not recognize backups replicated outside NetBackup's control. To replicate data under NetBackup's control, you need AIR.

Also I recommend not to duplication between media servers in single domain without Optimized Duplication as same amount of data from client will be travels between source media server and destination media server without Optimized Duplication.

anthony11
Level 2

Sure the dedup option has benefits, but the financial cost is high, and so is the management overhead.  I only anticipate having one NBU domain, but there are two servers and the intent is to have them replicate to each other.  Right now all the clients are backing up separately to both servers, which is silly in all sorts of ways.  The storage is just plain disk volumes.

I realize that replication without the dedup license will move more data - it's just a question of whether the high cost of the DO license is worth the traffic reduction, and how much real-world traffic reduction deduplication would achieve -- Symantec and the VAR would have me believe 10:1 but I'm skeptical.  Also as I understand it dedup pools can only be 64TB in size, and backup policies have to be mapped to a specific dedup pool, so I'd have to monitor usage somehow and weigh balanced usage vs. having similar clients together in a given pool so that dedup can work.

Currently I have client-side compression enabled on most clients.

Also, any scoop on when 7.6 will come out?