NetBackup 5200 Specs
There has been a flurry of comments and discussion on the NBU 5000 hereso Nicole, our marketing manager for appliances, thought it would be good to put something up about the newly launched 5200 and how it compares with the 5000. Straight to the hardware spec comparison: NetBackup 5200 NetBackup 5000 Form Factor 4U CPU Two Intel E5620 Quad Core (2.4GHz, 12MB cache, 1066MHz FSB) Two Intel E5405 Quad Core (2.0GHz, 12MB, Cache, 1333MHz FSB) Memory 32GB DDR 24GB DDR Disk Drives 24 x 2TB SATA 7200RPM 24 x 1TB SATA 7200RPM Disk Controller LSI 8708 EM2 RAID I/O 2 x 1 Gbit Ethernet 2 x 10 Gbit Ethernet 2 x 4 Gbit FC (Qlogic QLE2462) 4 x 1 Gbit Ethernet Other Ports 1 Ethernet Management Port 1 VGA 2 USB 2.0 1 Serial So you can see the 5200 is a little beefed up over the 5000 with more storage, more memory, faster CPU's and more I/O options (FC being the big one). But the biggest difference, and what makes the appliances tick, is the software. The NetBackup 5200 is a full NetBackup 7.0 Media Server. Meaning you can add it to an existing NBU environment, create dedupe pools on it for storage, replicate it to another 5200, hang tape drives off of it etc. Just like you'd install media server software for 7.0 on your own server. The NetBackup 5000 I previously posted about runs PureDisk software so it is more of a dedupe storage appliance than a full backup server. The 5200 has a bunch of network ports and they can actually be bonded to form a single group for performance and fault tolerance. This is important since NBU media servers typically accept a large number of clients from an IP network. When bonding the 10Gig or 1Gig ethernet ports together it does adaptive load balancing and doesn't need reconfiguration at the network switch level so backup or storage admins can drop this appliance in without pulling in the network team to muck with their switches (or you don't have to muck with the switch yourself if that's your job). We're really pumped about the 5200 since media servers are one of the most common pieces of hardware that need to be sized and spec'd when upgrading or deploying new NBU environments. Lots of people ask us "what is the best hardware for a new media server?". Well the answer is pretty clear now - it's the 5200! We've built this thing to be a beast at moving I/O which is the important part of a media server. And by bundling a bunch of storage in it also becomes a great disk pool so the media server can have its own local Storage Units. Let's see if this sparks the same discussion as the 5000...Optimized Synthetic Backups: Taking the art and science of synthesizing backups to a cut above
The concept of synthesizing full backups from previous full and new incremental backups had been in the industry for a while. The idea is to run incremental backups on client system so that its CPU and memory resources are used minimally. In addition, as the full data set is not moved over network, it is a great way to save network bandwidth.
Buy a NetBackup Appliance or Build My Own?
I was recently asked, “Why would I buy a NetBackup appliance when I could buy the software and cheap JBOD?” Initially, I was taken aback by the question. However, after giving it more thought, I realized it was a fair question and an opportunity to explain the benefits of NetBackup appliances.
