When I think of reliability, I can still hear the commercial, “Timex – Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking". It was the advertising slogan for Timex watches when they first were introduced to the market. While the slogan signified the watches durability, it was more than just a slogan as there was substance behind it. Durability was accomplished through precision tooling, design, and industry-leading materials. Having the substance behind the claim allowed Timex to become the leading watch company when 1 out of every 3 watches sold was a Timex.
Symantec has taken a similar approach to the NetBackup appliances with resiliency. The appliances are designed to Symantec specifications, optimized for performance, and built on the industry-leading NetBackup software. A great example of this is the NetBackup 5330 appliance.
The NetBackup 5330 is an integrated backup media server with storage to support greater performance, capacity, and resiliency requirements. Refer to my earlier blogs “Introducing NetBackup 5330 Integrated Appliance” and “NetBackup 5330: Performance and Scale” for additional information on the appliance.
Designed for Resilience
The NetBackup 5330 is designed for resiliency from the ground up and is an integrated appliance. It showcases leading edge Symantec technologies to ensure data protection, availability, and security in four key areas:
- Storage & Hardware Protection: the NetBackup 5330 can withstand multiple component failures and still operate through:
- Multiple data paths between compute node and storage
- Redundant hot swap components including RAID and disk controllers, power supplies, fan modules, and disks
- RAID Controller backup-battery
- RAID 6 configuration to mitigate disk failures
- System Protection: the system itself must be available and ensure access to the data for backups and recovery. The NetBackup 5330 appliance provides system availability through
- Symantec Storage Foundation for performance optimization
- Veritas File System (VxFS): highly available file system for faster recovery
- Symantec Storage Foundation Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) for availability and performance
- Call Home System Monitoring: provides proactive monitoring for the appliance
- Deduplication Pool Protection is Critical: the NetBackup 5330 was designed to protect the deduplication pool and to automatically detect and correct errors, if they should occur. Features of dedupe pool protection include:
- ShadowCopy and NetBackup DR policy; helps maintain redundancy and ensure data is recoverable at all times
- Data optimization for faster recovery
- Built on NetBackup 7.6 which includes self-healing architecture, end-to-end verification of backups, fault avoidance and error containment
- Crash consistent recovery from tape backups
- System Security; it is vital that the data is available, but equally important is knowing the data is secure. All NetBackup appliances deliver security by leveraging and integrating Symantec Critical Systems Protection (CSP) software for:
- Host intrusion Prevention to proactively protect against zero-day attacks and malicious insider threats
- Host Intrusion Detection for monitoring and auditing
Great Design Can Save the Environment
The NetBackup 5330 appliance is Energy Star compliant, and is the only integrated purpose-built backup appliance with this certification.
Not only does the appliance reduce power and cooling expenses compared to other backup appliances, but it has great density. Yes, being dense can be a good thing! It delivers more terabytes of usable capacity per rack space unit (RSU), or floor space, than competing products.
Summary
Accidents do happen, it is a part of life and technology, whether it is an act of nature or an act of omission or commission. Accidents are something we cannot control. What we can control is how we prepare, respond, and manage when the unexpected occurs. The NetBackup 5330 appliance is designed for resiliency to protect your data and ensure it is available when you need it most.
To learn more about the NetBackup 5330, check out:
