NetBackup 7 – De-duplicate Everywhere

Heard about the new features in NetBackup 7?  If you subscribe to any Backup Technology thread, I am quite sure you have… Symantec’s marketing team has done a great job about getting the word out about the new features like VMware vStorage API functionality, OpsCenter, and Deduplication. In my previous blog I touched upon OpsCenter… but what is this whole de-duplication about?  Why do I care?  Simply put, I can de-duplicate everywhere in my NetBackup Environment.  Everywhere?  Yes, everywhere! So here is what I mean.  We can deduplicate on NetBackup clients, NetBackup media servers, on disk appliances using OpenStorage, and of course… de-duplicate using NetBackup PureDisk.  Can you think of anywhere else I would need to de-duplicate?  Here are some additional details of each place within the NetBackup infrastructure that can be de-duplicated. The NetBackup Client: With NetBackup client-side deduplication, clients deduplicate their backup data and then send it directly to the storage destination. A media server does not deduplicate the data. NetBackup Client deduplication is a useful deduplication solution if a client host has unused CPU cycles or if the load balancing servers are overloaded. The NetBackup Media Server: NetBackup clients send their backups to a NetBackup media server, which deduplicates the backup data. A NetBackup media server hosts the NetBackup Deduplication Engine, which writes the data to the storage and manages the deduplicated data. NetBackup Media Server Deduplication is a useful deduplication solution if a client does not have enough CPU cycles to deduplicate its own data. Disk Appliance using OpenStorage: The NetBackup OpenStorage option lets third-party vendor appliances function as disk storage for NetBackup. The disk appliance provides the storage and it manages the storage. A disk appliance may provide deduplication functionality. NetBackup backs up and restores client data and manages the life cycles of the data. Appliance deduplication is a storage optimization or reduction strategy. It reduces the storage that you may require. Netbackup PureDisk: NetBackup PureDisk is a deduplication solution for bandwidth-optimized backups of data in remote offices. You can use PureDisk to reduce the amount of backup data that is stored in a datacenter by NetBackup. You use PureDisk interfaces to install, configure, and manage the PureDisk servers, storage pools, and client backups. You do not use NetBackup to configure or manage the storage or backups. PureDisk has its own documentation set.