NetBackup Appliances – Horsepower and Efficiency for Protecting the Enterprise

One of the more compelling obstacles to overcome when protecting a large enterprise is the ability to backup massive amounts of data within a relatively small window of time. Over the last decade, we have seen exponential data growth year after year within the enterprise. We have seen corporate growth, as remote offices are added and disaster recovery requirements, where SLAs have gone from 24-hour full recovery to a matter of hours. Just as the challenges of daily business have molded the evolution of the data center, the ability to effectively protect these data centers has become a hot topic within the industry and a legitimate concern. With virtualized environments through VMware and Hyper-V experiencing explosive growth in today’s business world, and data capacity growing at rates never before seen, traditional backup technologies and practices have become obsolete. So exactly how does one protect and manage today’s multiple locations, high-capacity enterprise environment?

Symantec, the industry leader in backup technologies, offers the silver bullet in the form of its 5220 and 5020 appliances. These purpose-built appliances are scalable, all-in-one units, which together can optimize even the largest of backup infrastructures.

The 5220 NetBackup appliance can be configured as either a NetBackup master or a NetBackup media server, while the 5020 is a target appliance and must be configured as a storage unit on a NetBackup media server, which can either be a 5220 appliance configured as a media server or a media server configured on the supported hardware of choice. Not only will these appliances integrate seamlessly into any existing NetBackup environment, they are ideal in situations where an aging NetBackup infrastructure is due for a hardware refresh.

The following example illustrates a typical use case for each of these appliances (click on image to see full size):

In the illustration above, the 5220 appliance in New York is the NetBackup master server for this domain. Clients at the New York headquarters and in the remote offices in New Jersey and Connecticut will backup to their local NetBackup 5220 media servers. Through the use of storage lifecycle policies within NetBackup, the clients are backed up to the 5220 local storage and duplicated to the 5020 target appliance. The images from the remote locations are then replicated to the headquarters location, where the data from both remote sites is globally deduplicated and written off to tape for offsite storage.

Symantec’s unique approach allows deduplication to occur at each of the major components involved in the data stream: the backup client, media server and target deduplication device. The ability to deduplicate at each of these levels significantly improves performance and efficiency in the backup data stream, as only the unique data segments are sent across the wire to a storage unit. The ability to deduplicate at the client level is a key factor in backup efficiency, as the minimum amount of backup data packets will traverse the network. This is further enhanced with NetBackup Accelerator, which was introduced in version 7.5.

So there you have it. The use of Symantec’s deduplication technologies combined with its NetBackup appliance hardware have effectively taken the pain out of shrinking backup windows, taking backup efficiency to a new level.