Review: Veritas NetBackup PureDisk v6.5.1

Today's enterprises often have terabytes of data files scattered across multiple storage networks, servers and desktop PCs. Add to that the issues of compliance, security and auditing, and it becomes easy to see why so many backup technologies have started to fall short of enterprise needs.

Symantec is looking to bring order to the chaos of enterprise backups with Veritas NetBackup PureDisk Version 6.5.1, a product that melds several backup technologies under a single umbrella to ease the backup process.

The latest iteration of Symantec's enterprise backup and deduplication suite is aimed at enterprise networks, both large and small. The product's claim to fame comes from the integration of several backup technologies into a single product that eliminates the need for specialised hardware and tape-based storage.

NetBackup PureDisk employs advanced technologies such as deduplication, bandwidth optimisation, granular backup policy controls, compression and encryption to bring efficiency, speed and ease of management to the forefront of the enterprise backup market. Some of the advanced features are the result of Symantec's 2006 purchase of Revivio, a company known for its Continuous Data Protection technology. Symantec has successfully integrated Revivio's technology into NetBackup, and has upped the ante with deduplication, extensive client support and branch office connectivity, all managed with a single, comprehensive console.

Symantec has done its best to keep complexity to a minimum, but NetBackup PureDisk is still a very complex product that takes significant network management savvy to master. The product is far from plug-and-play easy but, considering the extensive feature set, the company has done a decent job in automating many of the tasks and building wizards to perform other complex chores.

Looking at the individual components of the product, it becomes easy to see why complexity enters the equation. NetBackup PureDisk is based on a software appliance, which runs on a modified version of Suse Linux. As a software appliance, administrators can scale the product pretty easily by throwing as much hardware as needed at it.

The software consists of three primary parts, starting with the software appliance which is aptly named a NetBackup Media Server. Part two comes in the form of the backup clients. Each system to be backed up needs to run a small piece of client software provided by Symantec. The company offers clients for various flavours of Windows Server, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Server, Suse Linux Enterprise Server, IBM-AIX, Solaris, HP-UX and Mac OS.

Symantec also provides clients for popular applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. Currently, there is no direct support for Windows Desktop operating systems, Oracle, IBM DB2 or MySQL. But savvy administrators should be able to create scripts or batch files that will allow these non-supported applications to be backed up.

The final piece is the PureDisk Storage Pool, which is simply the storage target for backups. A storage pool consists of many different types of disk storage, ranging from storage area networks (SANs), to network attached storage devices and direct attached drives.

The three elements can be deployed in several different ways or combinations, depending on the network infrastructure and the number of remote sites, if any.

For example, if deploying the product in a datacentre that supports multiple remote offices, an administrator will install backup clients on each of the systems at the remote sites, and then deploy a NetBackup Media Server at each remote site. The datacentre will also have a NetBackup Media Server, and the PureDisk Storage Pool is likely to be located at the datacentre as well. Of course, there can be various permutations of this setup.

In practice, the solution works by performing backup processing, including deduplication and compression, at the local site, which significantly speeds up the backup process while reducing the overall size of the backup that has to be transmitted back to the datacentre. Other variations of this setup may include configuring additional Netbackup media servers for load balancing and failover, and additional storage pools for data mirroring or failover.

We tested NetBackup PureDisk by setting it up as an 'all-in-one' configuration. That meant a single 'node' solution, where all NetBackup services are installed on a single machine, as opposed to installing the metabase server, metabase engine, storage pool authority and content router on different systems. Our single node was installed on an HP server class system, running a pair of Xeon CPUs and 8GB of RAM. An 'all-in-one' or 'single node' installation is the simplest and most basic way to set up the product, and is appropriate for smaller enterprises or branch offices.

Setup consisted of installing the NetBackup PureDisk operating system, PDOS, which is based on Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Service Pack 1 (SLES10 SP1). Hardware compatibility is determined by the requirements of SLES10 SP1. Simply put, if the hardware can run SLES10 SP1, then it will be fine for PDOS.

After installing PDOS, administrators will need to install NetBackup PureDisk, which comes on Linux standard TAR files. Although the included instructions are straightforward, experience with Linux is a definite plus when it comes to the initial setup and configuration. An installation requires at least two disks, a boot disk and a storage disk. The storage disk can be direct attached storage as in an internal drive, a disk array as in iSCSI and fibre channel, or a SAN.

Administrators will want to properly size their hardware, making sure that enough processing power and storage is available. Symantec offers detailed instructions on capacity planning in the documentation. Luckily, setting up the nodes is the most complex part of the product. The remaining chores are relatively straightforward and consist of deploying agents or backup clients, configuring storage options, running wizards and setting up various system parameters.

Installation of the client software was very simple, just a matter of running an installation program on the target machines. Administrators could also install the clients remotely using any deployment and management technologies that they may already have in-house.

While it is not rocket science, a good understanding of storage, networking and security is needed to successfully deploy the software. Once deployed, NetBackup PureDisk is managed via a concise browser-based tool that offers context-sensitive help. The management console can be a little intimidating, simply because of the number of menus, pull-downs and options.

For the most part, the management console offers a logical procession through the various choices. That said, it could be better organised and vastly improved with a tab-based interface that focuses on common functions. But potential purchasers should not be put off by those minor complaints, as Symantec intends to overhaul the interface in a future version of the product.

After testing a few backup scenarios it became easy to see where NetBackup PureDisk offers the most value. One of the more interesting aspects is how the product handles backing up virtual machines, which we tested with a couple of Microsoft Hyper-V virtual PCs.

Virtual machines are becoming very popular in datacentres and offer their own unique challenges. The technology used by Symantec's solution addresses many of those virtual machine challenges. For example, deduplication can reduce the size of the backup by a factor of 10 or more, by identifying which software elements of a virtual machine are the same as other virtual machines. Most virtual machines are created by duplicating a standard virtual machine, so many files across the virtual machines are the same. Removing those duplicate files from the backup saves significant space and time.

The deduplication process runs on the NetBackup media server, and the process was very fast in our tests and barely taxed the CPUs. We were able to run dedupe on 300GB of backup files data in under 15 minutes, using local Sata drives on the NetBackup media server we had built. Simply put, our test bed could handle significantly more data, and most, if any, performance issues will be dictated by the speed of the network backbone and the throughput of the storage disk.

The major strengths of NetBackup PureDisk come from its flexibility. It can be scaled relatively easily and deployed in a way that best suits the target environment. Scaling up usually means just adding more media servers, and incorporating failover has the same basic requirements.

That flexibility extends to the types of storage that can be used, as well as the hardware selected. Additional advantages of NetBackup PureDisk come from its disk-based nature of backup processing, which eliminates the complexity of tape media while significantly speeding up backups.

Of course, administrators can move backup files to tape for long-term storage or archival purposes if needed. The viability of disk-based backups is further enhanced by the product's deduplication abilities and data compression prowess, which can reduce storage needs by as much as a factor of 10.

While there are several other vendors in the backup and deduplication space, Symantec seems to be unique by offering a solution that incorporates several technologies that ultimately reduce the hardware, software and expenses associated with enterprise data backups.