Like all of us these days, I was working late one night pondering some of the changes I have seen in the Backup and Recovery space. Even the name for what we call “Backup and Recovery” has morphed into more of a resiliency play. For many customers, the expectation of a traditional “backup my data and make sure I can recover it” is ever-changing and expanding to include operations such as anomaly detection, last known good, bulk restore, immutability control, locking, and other requirements in the face of ransomware, cost pressures, and increasing regulation. Due to the expansion of customer environments from traditional core to edge to cloud, this ever-changing attack surface drives this profound change to resiliency expectations. Clearly, another aspect of the ever-expanding requirements for the “Resilient Enterprise” is the drive for automation and orchestration of frequently and highly repetitious and, in some cases, extremely critical and complicated operations.
In the past, backup operations have followed obligatory input instructions through a GUI or command-line instructions. These commands perform a series of actions, and these actions achieve the desired outcome. This is how we have always done it, and this process has worked well in the past. However, with the increase in the requirements of the resilient enterprise, the human factor can become a challenge. Administrators can make mistakes, especially when required to perform tasks across platforms, applications, and geographically dispersed regions. Veritas Netbackup has embraced an API first effort with all new modules and existing components. APIs are a way to facilitate effective communication between various steps that solve several tasks that create an orchestrated and operational workflow for Netbackup. Today, a backup infrastructure is built atop multiple layers of different clients, operating systems, and applications, which in many cases have different architectures and interfaces. Netbackup supports the REST (REpersentational State Transfer) APIs. REST provides a stateless and standardized architecture that enables Veritas Netbackup to seamlessly automate the exchange of information between Netbackup processes to create roles. Netbackup has more than 700 APIs that can be leveraged to seamlessly work with numerous orchestration tools such as Ansible, Chef, and others while providing integrations with self-tools such as ServiceNow to create meaningful automation.
For example, you can automate the process of performing a backup via policy by creating a simple workflow:
Or something as complicated as configuring a VM Server and Protect Multiple VMs using Netbackup Intelligent Groups:
With Netbackup APIs, customers can solve a host of problems that can play a role in the “Resilient Enterprise.”
Take the time to visit our GitHub site for code samples and useful information to help you streamline your Netbackup operations using APIs.
Additionally, Veritas API & Continuous Integration webpage provides further information on using NetBackup APIs—the key to a reliable, flexible, automation solution for all your backup and recovery needs.
