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Smartphones and Backup

cdavitian
Not applicable
Employee

What was your reaction when you got your first phone call on a smartphone? If you’re like me, it was something like: 

"Oh yeah, this makes sense. The caller’s name appears on the screen. My music stops playing. With one click, I can respond with a text message. That’s how a phone should work.”smartphones.jpg

If you’re like my colleague Joel Martins, your reaction was:

“Can I manage a NetBackup restore like this?” No joke.

Joel runs the development group for NetBackup. He’s as "NetBackup" as it gets – he started as a green engineer in the NetBackup 3.2 days and he even named his first child bprestore (joke…). More importantly, Joel was the first person to realize that we could apply the lessons of the iPhone-age to data protection.

Backup is the backbone of any datacenter – it maintains data integrity so that the application infrastructure can do its job. We believe the best way to ensure data integrity is to make backup intuitive. The more intuitive the tool, the more likely customers will successfully protect their data.

If the mantra of NetBackup today is, “Industry-leading performance and flexibility”, we aim to make it, “Simplicity without sacrifice” in the next few years. This is not a retreat from providing best-in-class performance – part of simplicity is to “just work” in the largest datacenters in the world. 

Simplicity starts with NetBackup 7.6, which we released this past January. Let me walk through the goals driving “simplicity without sacrifice” and talk about how NetBackup 7.6 advances our customers’ goals:

  • Backup provisioning should be automatic: Our customers have better things to do than configure and re-configure thousands of policies. And now we have the intelligence to automate the drudgery. We’re packaging this automation in our Intelligent Policy family of tools. Virtual Intelligent Policies came first in 7.1. The Oracle Intelligent Policy Framework is the latest addition in 7.6. We’ve also integrated NetBackup with vCloud Director, VMware’s automation solution, so that users can leverage their vCloud frameworks to streamline NetBackup protection policies and restores.
  • Backup policies should be transparent to backup “customers”.  The days of the siloed backup professional are over. Backup is too important for it to be left in a dark corner – we hear it every day from DBAs and VM administrators who want better visibility into backups. So we’re introducing ways for our “partners” to see and touch backups. NetBackup 7.6 introduces a vCenter plugin that gives VM Admins the ability to view backup status of their virtual machines and conduct restores without needing to contact the backup team.
  • One tool should manage all protection. Recent years have seen a proliferation of data protection tools and consequently a multiplying of capacity under management. But now we’re seeing the inevitable backlash – Copy Data Management is a movement to scale data protection back to fewer tools.  Amen! NetBackup is leading our customers in this direction. Replication Director, first introduced in 7.5, is an example - it merges array-based snapshots and backup into a single protection tool. With 7.6, we’ve enhanced it to natively protect VM-based workloads.
  • Protection should be silent. Sometimes a backup tool seems like an unpredictable child - one day it breaks the network, the next day a restore takes hours longer than expected. These problems are solvable. NetBackup 7.6 moves us towards a place where protection just happens; no fuss, no grief. NetBackup Accelerator, first introduced in 7.5 has been extended to cover VMware – radically compressing the backup window and associated infrastructure load for VMware backups. Instant Recovery debuted in 7.6. This is a tool that does what it promises –recovers workloads within seconds – reducing downtime and getting you back to driving your business forward.

You can learn more about the new NetBackup 7.6 features here: http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/fact_sheets/b-symantec-netbackup-7.6-so-21304209.pd...

Stay tuned for more! Coming releases will continue our drive towards simplicity without sacrifice.