The power of NetBackup Deduplication: Flexibility and scalability

[AbdulRasheed]

In the last two blogs (see the links below) we covered the cornerstone pillars that make NetBackup Deduplication stand out in the crowded deduplication solutions market.  Let us conclude this series with a few implementation power points. 

Flexibility to choose software or appliance solution

NetBackup Deduplication can be deployed as a software solution on commodity hardware and storage or it can deployed quickly using NetBackup appliances. The software solution provides the capability to design your own deduplication solution from scratch. The appliances provide turnkey solutions for both enterprise data center and remote offices. The deduplication and other NetBackup features can be deployed in a matter of minutes using appliances.

Flexibility to choose inline or post-process deduplication

There are many vendors who can provide an appliance solution for deduplication. The backup server sends the data to the appliance; the data may be deduplicated during or after the backup. The former method is called inline deduplication and latter is called post-process deduplication.  Although inline deduplication is preferred in most cases, there are edge cases where post-process deduplication is preferred to minimize the resource usage during backup. NetBackup 5200 series appliances provide both methods. With NetBackup 5000 series, the storage on media server can function as the landing zone for backups from where it can be deduplicated into the appliance afterwards.

Flexibility to deduplicate at source or target

NetBackup Deduplication can be done at source, thereby distributing the processing overhead across multiple systems. This also helps to significantly reduce bandwidth needed for backups. NetBackup Deduplication can also be done at the target media server, if the client processing power should not be used for backups. In contrast with stack solutions where two or more different technologies are loosely integrated to send backups to different kind of deduplication pools (thereby losing the global deduplication aspect of the overall solution), a single global deduplication pool in NetBackup can be used for source, target and post-process deduplication. Furthermore, you are not locked into one method or other depending on the initial implementation or application type; the way you perform deduplication for a given data set can be changed anytime.

Scalable architecture

NetBackup 5000 series appliances provide scalable platform to implement deduplication for backups. You can start with a 16TB or 32TB appliance and grow up to 192TB. As you add more capacity, you are also getting more processing power and bandwidth for the deduplication pool.  Traditional end point appliance solutions provide just additional storage shelves.  

Summary

In this series of blogs on power of NetBackup Deduplication, we attempted to touch salient features of NetBackup Deduplication. NetBackup Deduplication provides a global, scalable, flexible, distributed, secure and application aware deduplication platform. With the appliance form factor it provides a drop-in solution for deduplication of backup data.

Blogs in this series

The power of NetBackup Deduplication: Distributed processing and secure backup streams

The power of NetBackup Deduplication: Application awareness and global deduplication

The power of NetBackup Deduplication: Flexibility and scalability (this blog)