Symantec first gave a hint about this feature, which will be called NetBackup Accelerator, back at our US Vision conference in 2011 (read the press release here), where we announced our intention to break the backup window and provide customers with a plan to modernize data protection. NetBackup Accelerator, one part of this plan, helps customers protect their growing volume of data in less time and with less infrastructure.
One constant challenge in the world of backup and recovery is how to better meet backup windows given data growth of 50% per year. The traditional full backup is increasingly more difficult to perform. In some cases, it’s impossible. Yet, many organizations still want the safety of a full backup to quickly and reliably recover an entire set of data. Without it, they’re forced to rebuild a full image from a series of incremental backups. And if there is ever a problem with any of those incremental images, then recovery is slowed or worse, data loss occurs.
NetBackup Accelerator enables significantly faster backups while reducing the CPU and network resources required to move data. It offers you the power of a full backup at the speed of an incremental. For an organization, this can mean less backup administration time and less capital investment to continually update infrastructure resources. Underneath the covers the NetBackup client, which sits on the system to be protected, monitors changes as they occur and can eliminate the need to walk a file system in order to find changed files. The result is faster, lower impact backups and the ability to run far more backup jobs simultaneously.
There are a number of great use cases for this feature today such as large file systems, NAS, and remote offices. It can dramatically improve the backup of large network attached storage (NAS) filers, using NFS or CIFS, rather than remote NDMP, because only the changed files are backed up. You can now centralize remote office backup as well because significantly less data is moved over the network. But what about client-side deduplication you say? Why yes, client-side deduplication can further enhance the effectiveness of this feature. The two point punch here is the elimination of the CPU hit that occurs when you walk the file systems (something that client-side deduplication cannot do), the identification of changed blocks, and finally, the matching of those blocks with other blocks anywhere in your environment (deduplication). Finally, this efficient data stream can be sent to NetBackup deduplication storage, an OpenStorage (OST) device that supports a feature called Optimized Virtual Synthetics, or a supported cloud storage provider via NetBackup OST.
Of course, no discussion of fast backup is complete without talking about recovery. With NetBackup Accelerator, you don’t need to rebuild a full image from a series of incremental backups. It uses a feature called Optimized Synthetics to make a full image available for recovery without the need to move data (i.e., rebuild a full). Organizations can now achieve their recovery SLAs more easily versus traditional incremental backup approaches.
In our labs and with beta customers, NetBackup Accelerator can deliver dramatically faster backups and reduced CPU and bandwidth consumption. It’s one example of how Symantec is helping organization modernize backup and one great reason to learn more about the future of backup with Symantec.
Get connect to the countdown to better backup here: http://bit.ly/yenx3z
