In NetBackup 7, the combination of virtualisation protection and deduplication offers some amazing technical benefits for businesses. In a way, there are 2-for-1 savings. After years of backing up physical servers to tape, how can NetBackup 7 make such extraordinary claims and how could it apply to my business?
First, NetBackup 7 for VMware integrates with VMware’s vStorage APIs for Data Protection (aka VADP). In other words, if you were waiting for a drastic improvement over VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), this is it. By definition, using VADP with NetBackup 7 will reduce VM backup times in half! Why? Because VADP allows NetBackup to read the VM snapshot directly from the source. With VCB, NetBackup had to wait for VMware to copy the entire VM snapshot to a staging area before the backup began. No more!
Second, NetBackup 7 for VMware integrates with the vSphere 4 Change-Block-Tracking capability. This allows NetBackup 7 to only backup the new or modified blocks within a VMDK, aka incremental backup. (Recall that VCB did not support incremental backups.) Moreover, NetBackup 7 supports the unique option to perform file-level recovery from an incremental backup. So, backing up fewer blocks means shorter backup windows, without limiting your recovery options.
NetBackup 7 introduces integrated deduplicated storage in the NetBackup media server. The NetBackup PureDisk deduplication engine is now integrated and available as a new type of backup destination. Any/all NetBackup clients can immediately leverage this capability, including NetBackup for VMware. In evaluations, we’ve seen deduplication rates from 50% to 90% in VM backups.
And finally, NetBackup 7 for VMware offers an unheard-of advantage: global deduplication across physical and virtual machines! This means that no matter how many copies of the same file are distributed between physical and virtual Windows servers (e.g. explorer.exe), effectively only 1 copy of that file is stored in the NetBackup deduplicated backup destination.
The storage savings apply to both physical and virtual servers!