One good way to relax during the holidays: Symantec NetBackup OST Enhancements for HP StoreOnce

[StorageExperts]

By Anirudh S Srinivasan, Worldwide Product Manager, HP Storage

Another year comes to a close and the holiday season begins. It is time to go on vacations, sit back, relax and spend time with family and friends. But can you really be sure that your business-critical data is protected and safe? Will all your backups be completed on time? Can you recover your data in case of a disaster while you are on vacation?

We at HP are in the business of ensuring you have complete peace of mind when it comes to
protecting your data, which is why HP, a leader in Deduplication Backup Target Appliances, is partnering with Symantec, a leader in Enterprise Backup/Recovery software to modernize data protection through our HP AllianceOne Data Agile Partner Program.

We’ve had a very busy year on this front. Before we head into the holidays, I want to focus on the significant progress we’ve made in tightening the integration of HP StoreOnce Backup and Symantec NetBackup via the HP StoreOnce Open Storage Technology (OST) plug-in.

Auto Image Replication (A.I.R.)

In the beginning of 2014, we introduced support in StoreOnce Backup systems for the Symantec NetBackup Automatic Image Replication feature (Untargeted A.I.R. or Classic A.I.R.), which was introduced with NBU 7.1.

A.I.R. protects against site outages by replicating backups between StoreOnce appliances across NetBackup domains, typically spread over geographical sites, and cataloging the replicated images in the target domains. This capability enables fast, scalable disaster recovery because backup images are available for immediate recovery from any domain or global location, with minimized storage footprint and bandwidth impact.

Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) for file systems and VMware

Last June, at HP Discover, Las Vegas, we announced support for NetBackup Granular Recovery Technology (GRT), first introduced with NBU 6.5.3. GRT which allows you to recover individual items and objects from backups. For instance, you can recover a single e-mail message or a document rather than restore a whole mailbox or an entire information store. This is ideal for customers who seek fast backups, along with fast business-oriented, need-based recovery.

Targeted A.I.R

The latest StoreOnce software update (announced at HP Discover in December and available in January 2015) follows up the support for Classic A.I.R. with Targeted A.I.R., a feature introduced with NBU 7.6. Targeted A.I.R. is particularly beneficial for customers with one-to-many and many-to-many replication topologies, as it allows them to select a subset of available StoreOnce target appliances for replication. Using Targeted A.I.R. with StoreOnce facilitates customers to plan for dynamic disaster recovery scenarios. You can select a different retention period at each selected StoreOnce target appliance to satisfy different protection needs, such as short or medium term retention, hot standby or long-term disaster recovery.

Accelerator for filesystems and VMware

Along with Targeted A.I.R., the latest StoreOnce software update also supports NetBackup Accelerator (for filessystems and VMware-type policies). You can use Accelerator for significantly faster backups—and especially for full backups, which can be completed at the speed and cost of incremental backups. Accelerator achieves this by detecting changes that occurred since the last backup, then using just the changed data and the data existing from previous backups to intelligently create an inline synthetic full backup on the StoreOnce appliance. Most importantly, restore is significantly faster since you can recover from a single source (the synthetic full), rather than from multiple backup images (full + multiple incrementals). This approach has the added advantage of reducing the CPU overhead on the client and reduced utilization of network bandwidth, as it sends only the changed data.

 

More in store in 2015!

While that’s a good list for 2014, we’ve already started looking toward 2015 and beyond. And we willl continue to partner with Symantec in simplifying your backup processes. Meanwhile, you can rest assured that HP has got your data covered, so you can enjoy the holiday season. 

Read more about how you can benefit from optimized data protection with HP StoreOnce and Symantec NetBackup.

And happy holidays to all from the BURA Sunday storage bloggers!