NetBackup 7.6 Blueprints - SANClient

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The Technical Services team for Backup and Recovery have produced a number of documents we call "Blueprints".

These Blueprints are designed to show backup and recovery challenges around specific technologies or functions and how NetBackup solves these challenges.

Each Blueprint consists of:

• Pain Points: What challenges customers face
• Whiteboard: Shows how NetBackup solves the customer challenges
• Recommended Configuration: Shows recommended installation
• Do’s: Gives detailed configurations suggested by Symantec
• Don'ts: What configurations & pitfalls customers should avoid
• Advantages: Summarises the NetBackup advantages

SAN Client is a NetBackup optional feature that provides high-speed backups and restores of NetBackup clients. SAN Client supports both Disk storage and Tape storage. NetBackup allows the storage devices to be connected to the FT media servers by any means. It uses SCSI protocol to send backup and restore data over the FC SAN to/from a Fibre Transport (FT) Media Server – which directs backup and restore traffic to/from storage units, resulting in higher backup and restore performance.

SAN Client provides all the performance benefits of the SAN Media Server with none of the associated impact on the client system (has smaller footprint, lower resource consumption, and less complex NetBackup upgrade scenarios that SAN Media Server), and supports Multiplexing and Multistreaming.

FT media servers

A NetBackup FT media server is a NetBackup media server on which the Fibre Transport services are activated. NetBackup FT media servers accept connections from SAN clients and send data to the disk storage. The host bus adapters (HBAs) that accept connections from the SAN clients use a special NetBackup target mode driver to process FT traffic. The media server FT service controls data flow, processes SCSI commands, and manages data buffers for the server side of the FT pipe. It also manages the target mode driver for the host bus adaptors. Requires the SAN Client license.

SAN clients

A NetBackup SAN client is a NetBackup client on which the Fibre Transport service is activated. The SAN client is similar to the NetBackup SAN media server that is used for the Shared Storage Option; it backs up its own data. However, the SAN client is based on the smaller NetBackup client installation package, so it has fewer administration requirements and uses fewer system resources. Usually, a SAN client contains critical data that requires high bandwidth for backups. It connects to a NetBackup media server over Fibre Channel. The NetBackup SAN Client Fibre Transport Service manages the connectivity and the data transfers for the FT pipe on the SAN clients. The SAN client FT service also discovers FT target mode devices on the NetBackup media servers and notifies the FT Service Manager about them.

FT Service Manager

The FT Service Manager (FSM) resides on the NetBackup server that hosts the NetBackup Enterprise Media Manager service. FSM interacts with the FT services that run on SAN clients and on FT media servers. FSM discovers, configures, and monitors FT resources and events. FSM runs in the same process as EMM.

SAN Client and clustering

The SAN client can be in a cluster and can host clustered applications. The FT client service and the Symantec PBX service must run on all failover nodes. The SAN client OS on every node must detect the FT media server target mode driver.

FT media servers

The backup policy references to client computers can be to aliases or dynamic application cluster names. SAN client application cluster information is updated every 5 minutes.

You can download the full Blueprint from the link below.