NetBackup 6.5.4

[TimBurlowski]

Most of you are probably aware that we released 6.5.4 NetBackup a few weeks ago. You can read all about it in the recent press release.

I thought I would share a few fun facts about the release. Over 200 people participated in our First Availability (FA) program. If you aren’t familiar with the FA program, unlike a Beta release, FA customers are actually encouraged to run the software in production and the release is fully supported. By the time we released 6.5.4 to the general public it had over 4000 days of production time behind it. When surveyed afterwards the participants gave the release a big thumbs up, with extremely high satisfaction rates and an astounding 91% responding that they would recommend 6.5.4 FA to other Symantec customers. If you participated I would like to offer you our sincere thanks for participation.

Given the number of enhancements in this release I can’t do the justice to all the new functionality. You can get more info from the technote or the datasheet.

Here are a few of my personal 6.5.4 favorite features in no special order.

• OpenStorage Optimized Virtual Synthetics. I know that feature title is a mouthful, but trust me it’s a cool feature. In the past you have been able to synthetic full backups, but with a cost. The process involved the reading all the full and incremental backups and creating the new synthetic full on a media server. In the worst case the time required to create the synthetic full might be similar to the time required to actually do the full backup normally. Our OpenStorage partners, as well as our own de-dupe solution PureDisk, maintains a mapping of files to data blocks. Because this “block map” already exists, one can then readily create a new mapping without reading in the data first, resulting in significant time savings to create the synthetic. So what this really means is “Incrementals Forever, without Restore Forever”. At present no OpenStorage vendor supports this feature, but stay tuned, we expect to have initial support in the next rev of PureDisk and at least one OpenStorage hardware vendor will support it relatively soon.
• Our award winning virtual machine protection for VMWare is now available for Microsoft Hyper-V as well as newly minted support for VMWare vSphere.
• Our Patent pending Granular Recovery Technology has been improved for SharePoint and now also supports Active Directory. This means a user to do object level restores from a quick single pass backup.
• NetBackup Operations Manager now supports monitoring 100 NetBackup master servers.
• NetBackup Operations Manager will support parent job grouping so operators can easily group the many jobs which may be spawned off in the case of multi-streaming or other job types which have child or even grandchild jobs.
   

As always check out the 6.5.4 Late Breaking News page. We update it routinely with the latest information. You’ll especially want to be familiar with one issue in particular having to do with non-default settings for Windows Open File backups. There is a technote and a fix available if you need it.