Application downtime can bring significant costs and penalties, For example, recent research from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) highlighted “loss of customer confidence, direct loss of revenue and missed opportunity” as the top three impacts that could result from application downtime or data loss. Despite this, many organizations still use legacy data protection technology designed decades ago for fast backup and storage efficiency but not for fast restore.
A new data protection architecture built on flash storage technology has emerged that enables organizations to restore as fast as or, in some cases, faster than backup. Today, many are successful in backing up data with high-performance throughput, and they’ve settled for less than optimal data recovery performance.
Pure Storage® all-flash technology not only delivers on the core value of legacy solutions (fast backup, storage efficiency) but also provides blazing-fast restore performance to help you meet stringent service level agreements (SLAs) and mitigate implications stemming from application downtime. We this integration the NetBackup application ca drive up to 16TB/HR backup performance rates, and moreover, up to 20-23TB/HR restore performance rates, provided with the right NetBackup server configuration and with decent network bandwidth available.
Value Prop
To explain the real value proposition of protecting data on Flash, I will use an example of Apple’s iPhone device because this is the device that is very common in the consumer’s world. Nowadays, we are so much used to smartphone devices in our day to day life, and its’ not just using heavily for telecommunication but also been consumed for other purposes such as browsing, services, or, taking live videos and pictures. Now the question is that how can we save those memories captured in the form of pictures or videos! Maybe performing the backup of the smart device? There are a couple of ways to protect the pivotal data. a) Either backup to your local computer with NVME, b) Back it up to PC with a spinning disk. Now, how many of us are in a situation where we need to restore GB’s of data back to your smart device, it can happen on multiple occasions, a) If you lose your device, b) Or want to do a device upgrade, and the real question comes how fast I can get my device data back and get it running. Based on my personal experiences, whenever there is a need to upgrade the device, I just restore the backup-image from the local copy which is on NVME storage. It just takes a few minutes to restore the whole image which is 100 GB of data into the new device. Now, that’s pretty impressive to see such a high performance and getting full image restored under 6-8 minutes. How’s that achieved? It’s because the backup target and source are running on high-end consumer flash storage running with the world-class software.
Now, imagine that if this sought of experience is transformed into the enterprise data centers that will shift gears in the data protection world. This dream of having a high-grade consumer-storage performant device in enterprise datacenter is been fulfilled with the industry’s first Pure Storage FlashBlade.
Pure Storage FlashBalde
FlashBlade is the world’s first data hub. It’s a storage system, unlike anything the storage industry has ever delivered. From software to hardware, everything is tuned for data-intensive workloads, and to deliver on four essential qualities of a data hub. FlashBlade is meant to deliver high-performance bandwidth, It is built from the ground-up to unify file and object on a single scale-out platform to consolidate all data-intensive applications, starting with backup and data protection all the way to AI clusters. FlashBlade offers simple and native scale-out architecture that grows seamlessly to deliver data to any application. Its multi-dimensional performance is architect to deliver unbiased performance for any unstructured data, it delivers multi-dimensional performance for any data, any I/O. And it is massively parallel. It is built on a modern software system that scales limitlessly, delivering performance to tens of thousands of clients accessing billions of objects. For more information on FlashBlade please visit, https://www.purestorage.com/products/flashblade.html
FlashBlade Integration with NetBackup
You can host the source primary application on any storage. In this instance by hosting the source application or database on FlashArray, however, FlashBlade will be able to take advantage of extremely fast read and write speeds, helping improve backup and recovery performance even more. The backup applications are configured with NFS mount points on FlashBlade as the target for NFS storage A full FlashBlade system configuration consists of up to five self-contained rack-mounted chassis interconnected by high-speed links to two external fabric modules (XFM). At the rear of each chassis are two on-board fabric modules for interconnecting the blades, other chassis, and clients using TCP/IP over high-speed Ethernet. Both fabric modules are interconnected, and each contains a control processor and Ethernet switch ASIC. For reliability, each chassis is equipped with redundant power supplies and cooling fans. The front of each chassis holds up to 15 blades for processing data operations and storage. Each blade assembly is a self-contained compute module with processors, communication interfaces, and either 17TB or 52TB of flash memory for persistent data storage. The current FlashBlade system can support more than 1.5 million NFSv3 getattrs per second, or >17GiB/sec of 512KiB reads or >8GiB/sec of 512KiB overwrites on a 3:1 compressible dataset in a single 4U chassis with 15 blades and can scale compute and performance up to a 5 x 4U chassis with 75 blades.
You can have multiple NetBackup Media Servers each connecting to different NFS system and can be combined together to form one storage unit group for load balancing the backup and restore jobs.
Look for the blog on Configuring FlashBlade as Storage unit target on NetBackup in this link https://mandeeparora.com/netbackup-on-flashblade-nfs-target/
