ExaGrid with Commvault and Veritas NetBackup

Not just for Veeam...

In my previous article, I looked at how ExaGrid integrates with the Veeam data mover. A lot of IT professionals know all about the Veeam/ExaGrid alliance, and quite often I hear that ExaGrid is ‘backup storage designed for Veeam’. While it is probably true that Veeam are ExaGrid’s best friend in the industry, ExaGrid can help fantastically with other enterprise backup vendors. Commvault and Netbackup from Veritas are the best place to look. Commvault and Netbackup customers have invested time and money in their backup infrastructure and training, this makes them more resistant to wholesale changes.

Commvault

Yes – Commvault already has its own deduplication system. Simply put, Media Agents can be used to deduplicate the backup data and then write the backups to normal disk. So why the need for ExaGrid?

The simple reason is that ExaGrid can deduplicate Commvault’s already deduplicated data. What this means in practice is that Commvault users can choose to leave Commvault dedupe on, or switch it off.

If a Commvault customer does not want to change their backup infrastructure beyond the storage, they leave everything as it is, and just change the storage. If they are currently writing 100TB of full backup (deduplicated) every weekend, they could find themselves writing 30TB with ExaGrid instead. If you extrapolate that over a typical one year retention policy, the savings could be considerable – plus the ExaGrid appliances need a smaller landing zone, as they are receiving already-deduped data. Not just savings on the storage either, time spent managing the storage would be reduced too.

What if a customer is carrying out a bigger refresh? Probably both the storage and their media agents, but keeping Commvault in place. Media Agents are the Commvault servers that deduplicate and move the backup data, they are typically powerful (and expensive) servers. Customers looking to refresh all of this can move their deduplication process from the Media Agents on to the ExaGrid servers. In this example, the customer can specify Media Agents with much lower amounts of compute – a potentially huge cost saving.

NetBackup

The other big enterprise backup software seen in the market is Veritas NetBackup. ExaGrid has a great story here too. It is true that Veritas sell deduplication appliances that sit behind their software – so what’s the difference? First of all, ExaGrid isn’t a deduplication appliance – by using a tiered architecture, ExaGrid offers the performance of using straight disk tier with the cost benefit of storing the multiple backup copies in a deduplicated tier. This means the performance of backups and restores is streets ahead. ExaGrid appliances are also scale-out, so you can increase capacity AND performance as you grow your backup storage.

Technically, ExaGrid bring some great functionality to NetBackup customers too. First of all, ExaGrid supports OST (OpenStorage Technology) – meaning that data replicated by ExaGrid is known about by Netbackup, and can be recovered more quickly as a result.

ExaGrid also integrates with Netbackup’s Accelerator technology. Not only does ExaGrid support the use of Accelerator, but it takes it to the next level by not just presenting a full image from incremental updates – ExaGrid actually will write a synthetic full backup in the Landing Zone. This synthetic full backup will provide a much quicker platform to recover from than a synthetic image which is deduplicated. 

Along with Commvault and Netbackup, ExaGrid works with many other backup vendors. HYCU, IBM Spectrum Protect, Zerto backups, SQL dumps and Oracle dumps are the obvious ones, but there others too. 

Other articles in this series:

1.What is ExaGrid?

2. ExaGrid integration with the Veeam Data Mover

3. ExaGrid – Commvault and NetBackup

4. ExaGrid’s upcoming feature for Ransomware Protection

5. ExaGrid - Fixing the Economics of Backup?