Veritas Flex 5340 Appliance: Container, meet NetBackup.

Launched in November last year, the NetBackup 5340 appliance is a beast. It sports 2x 20-core Intel Xeon 6138 CPUs and 768GB DDR4 memory, with usable storage capacity of up to 1.92 PB. This month, we are introducing a product that looks similar to the 5340 appliance but runs NetBackup in a totally different way.

Unlike traditional 5340 appliance, the Flex 5340 is built from the ground up to run NetBackup server in Docker container. You can mix and match up to 6 NetBackup master and media servers, each running in its own container.  The beauty of container is it uses computing power more efficiently than Hypervisor-based Virtual Machine.

Theoretically we can run many NetBackup instances inside the Flex 5340 box, but for now, Engineering limits the number of instances to six. This allows performance to be comparable to a typical dedicated NetBackup server. In the future, you can deploy other Veritas applications as containers once they are available.

The Flex 5340 is cluster ready too. You can add a second Flex 5340 and cluster them together in approximately 15 minutes. If one node goes down, the containers can fail over and continue running.

 

 

 

NetBackup 8.1.1 is now available!

Admittedly, I should have written this post earlier. NetBackup 8.1.1 is already out since February 16th, 2018. Despite the version increasing by “0.0.1”, it is not a maintenance pack. It is a full release.

You can check out the list of new features, enhancements and changes here.  One of the most exciting new features (to me, anyway) is the option to choose either fixed-length deduplication or variable-length deduplication (VLD). VLD is disabled by default and can be granularly enabled for a particular backup policy or client.

There is an endless debate on which method is better, but I feel that each one has its own merit. Most backup software is stuck with only one method.