When it comes to disaster recovery, there has historically been a limitation on disk storage. While tapes can easily be sent offsite to be used for restores after a site outage, disks do not offer the same flexibility. Some OpenStorage technologies, support out-of-band replication in which the contents of the disk storage are replicated between devices. In these instances, NetBackup has no knowledge of the data, which complicates recovery in a NetBackup protected environment because the replicated data can only be accessed after recreating the NetBackup catalog. Replication is done by importing the entire contents of the disk storage at the remote site using the bpimport command. The nbcatsync utility, introduced in NetBackup 6.5.6 and 7.0.1, can address this challenge as well, but it relies on being able to restore the catalog from a catalog backup and then post-processing it to reconcile the disk device mappings, resulting in a very time consuming process.

Alright everyone, stop talking to Siri for a minute and listen up. Storage Foundation just got Deduplicaton. Let me say it one more time. STORAGE FOUNDATION JUST GOT DEDUPLICATION. Just in case you missed anything of what I just said. Here you go…

This is my advice for customers who want to get started with storage efficiency: • Consider SATA drives instead of Fiber Channel • Enable Dedupe • (Use Flash Cache as insurance against bad performance) NetApp has other efficiency features too (thin provisioning, cloning, compression, and so on), but I’ve found that customers often start with SATA and dedupe. SATA because it saves so much money, and dedupe because it’s so easy to turn on and comes free with ONTAP. When I talk with customers who are using SATA and dedupe, they are usually happy with NetApp, and pleased with their storage costs. When customers are haggling over price but haven’t at least considered these features, I wonder what they are thinking. SATA with Flash Cache doesn’t always match the performance of Fiber Channel, but when it does, it can cut your costs in half. It’s definitely worth considering! We have many happy customers using it for production data. Home directories are a good place to start. Email, especially with the most recent versions of Exchange. Some customers use it for database, depending on the workload.

Come one come all come see the greatest spectacle in the known universe… NetBackup 7.5 Beta. It removes excess body hair, cures mad cow disease, protects against the occasional snake bite, and Justin Beiber. Okay, so maybe these features are not in the NetBackup 7.5. However you can find these: - Primary Replication Management: Unified Policy-based Management of Backups, Snapshots and Replication. - Deduplication of storage in multiple deployment environments. - Single dynamic data protection solution across physical and virtual data centers including mission critical applications. - Enable the use of cloud-based offsite storage - Search metadata associated with backup images Want to learn more? Symantec’s NetBackup Guy can help! One size does not fit all when it comes to protecting applications- check out more information here:

NetBackup offers a variety of ways to reduce storage capacity using deduplication. In fact, we believe our users should deduplicate everywhere. Backup is the killer app for deduplication. Why? Well a backup is essentially a copy of your information to be used for a recovery in the event of a corruption, or if something goes wrong. So it’s basically an insurance policy. So if you’re doing backups over the weekend and incrementals during the week and your data change rate isn’t that high, why backup the same thing over and over again? Just think of how many instances of a particular file or application that you have across your entire company. Say I send out a 3MB PowerPoint presentation for a review and a co-worker changes the title slide, another tweaks a bullet or two. Now there are 3 copies totaling 9 MB with only a few minor changes! Because of examples like that, it’s probably no surprise that data is growing at an alarming rate. The problem is that network, server, and storage systems are trying to keep up with this growth. Many organizations are still relying heavily on tape, yet still implementing next generation technologies like virtualization. That makes the outdated practice of keeping data forever impossible, especially while trying to meet today’s more aggressive service levels. Symantec believes deduplication should be natively integrated into any backup application, and in fact with NetBackup 7 it is. Deduplication should live in every part of the information architecture, at the source and the destination.

Hal, the IT Admin from Symantec takes a look at data deduplication in this quick video. Symantec offers a great product in BackupExec that helps deal with this issue. Check out the video below:

NetApp’s video below is another great example of their creative and fun work environment. While I have never seen “8 Mile”, the concept was very fun, and not to mention accurate. The video provides a lot of good facts about Data Deduplication and sets the record straight on many issues or concerns that people may have.

Finally, a company has seen the light and offered an affordable, entry-level data deduplication offering that doesn’t have IT Managers counting pennies or Systems Administrators pulling their hair out!  Quantum is one of the storage industry leaders in data deduplication, having helped pioneer the technology in their disk based DXi offerings (see dedupe 101 video here).  Now they have presented a disk-based deduplication offering that focuses on the SMB a

Smartly managed data replication is an important element of many enterprises’ IT operations.  Good.  The problematic distant cousin to this is data duplication.  A sloppy, hard-to-avoid problem.  Data deduplication (DD) solves this problem by eliminating redundant data and reducing storage requirements—also known as "intelligent compression" or "single-instance storage".

With the release of Netbackup 7.0 scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, I wanted to give you my take on the substantive features. There are three:

1. Expanded protection and recovery for virtualization NetBackup 7.0 is going to reduce the hardware requirements for VMware by eliminating the need for a Proxy Server for off-host backups.