My Data Protection Deep Dive

As a Daymark Senior Data Protection Consultant, I genuinely get excited when I can learn about new features and approaches that help keep our clients’ data efficiently backed up, recoverable and secure. So, I was excited when Veritas nominated me to attend their 2017 Data Protection Interlock, an invitation-only global technical training event.

The theme of this year’s Interlock was to modernize NetBackup to remain the market leading data management solution that enables customers to harness the power of their information.The sessions focused on:

• Release of NetBackup (8.1) and NetBackup Appliances (3.1)
• Cross solution integration
• Workload data protection in the cloud
• Veritas’ future product functionality and product roadmap

There were many opportunities for hands-on learning, plus knowledge sharing with NetBackup experts from around the world. I attend the Cloud track. Here’s what I learned: 

NetBackup Appliances

The goal for NetBackup Appliances is to ensure that they are scalable, integrated solutions that provide information protection without complexity. To that end, NetBackup Appliances 3.0 offer the following new capabilities:

• Scalability with data growth
• Model 5240 -- 4TB to 398TB
• Model 5340 -- 120TB to 1.3PB
• Enhanced Resiliency and Performance
• Active/Active Clustered Media Servers (5340)
• Converged solutions
• Universal shares provide a deduplicated NFS or CIFS target for database dump and sweep
• Co-pilot instant recovery for Oracle Databases
• CloudCatalyst Appliances with 3 times the performance of other cloud gateways

NetBackup features released with 8.1

• NetBackup Catalyst, deduplication to the cloud
• NetBackup parallel streaming for big data -- “Hadoop”
• NetBackup MySQL support
• Secure Communications
• Virtual Appliances updates 
• Remote Office Master Server only up to 16TB
• Datacenter Media Server only up to 250TB
• NetBackup 5340 Appliance
• NetBackup 5240 now supporting 6 shelves 
• NetBackup High Availability 
• Nutanix hypervisor support 

NetBackup Futures

Veritas also offered insight into their product roadmap. There are a lot of great enhancements coming down the pike including:

• A new user experience (enhanced GUI)
• End to end workload workflow approach
• RESTful API interface
• New reporting platform 
• New Databases (MonoDB, Cassandra, Vertica, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc)
• New SaaS Applications
• Reduced upgrade and deployment time
• Integration with customer install and deployment tools
• Agentless client infrastructure
• Modern communications architecture for cloud and on-premises
• Best-in-class secure access controls
• Snapshot management for on-premises and cloud

My four-day data protection deep dive was well worth the time; enabling me to better help our clients implement their data protection strategy. As a Veritas Platinum Partner with more than 200 Veritas technical certifications, Daymark has been helping clients address data protection challenges efficiently and cost-effectively for more than 16 years. Contact me if you have any questions about NetBackup or if you’re interested in finding out how Daymark can architect a cost-effective solution that will simplify backup management and guarantee your data is secure, compliant, and easily recoverable.