Veritas NetBackup™ Appliance Administrator's Guide

About Universal Shares

Introduced with NetBackup Appliance release 3.1, the Universal Share feature was limited to a generic disk target for using MSDP with no direct integration with NetBackup. Starting with appliance release 3.2, the Universal Share offers direct integration with NetBackup through a new feature call the Protection Point.

The Universal Share feature provides data ingest into a NetBackup appliance using an NFS or a CIFS (SMB) share. Space efficiency is achieved by storing this data directly into an existing NetBackup-based deduplication pool.

The following information provides a brief description of the advantages for using Universal Shares:

The Universal Share feature provides a network-attached storage (NAS) option for NetBackup appliances as well as the software-only deployment of NetBackup (new in the NetBackup 8.3 release). Traditional NAS offerings store data in conventional, non-deduplicated disk locations. Data in a Universal Share is placed on highly redundant storage in a space efficient, deduplicated state. The deduplication technology that is used for this repository is the same MSDP location used by standard client-based backups.

Any data that is stored in a Universal Share is automatically placed in the MSDP, where it is deduplicated automatically. This data is then deduplicated against all other data that was previously ingested into the media server's MSDP location. Since a typical MSDP location stores data across a broad scope of data types, the Universal Share offers significant deduplication efficiency. Starting with appliance release 3.2, the Protection Point feature lets you create a point in time copy of the data that exists in the specified Universal Share. Once a Protection Point is created, NetBackup automatically catalogs the data in that point and manages it like any other data that is ingested into NetBackup. Since the Protection Point only catalogs the Universal Share data that already resides in the MSDP, no data movement occurs. Therefore, the process of creating a Protection Point can be extremely fast.

The Universal Share feature supports a wide array of clients and data types. NetBackup software is not required on the client where the share is mounted. Any operating system that uses a POSIX compliant file system and can mount a CIFS or an NFS network share can write data to a Universal Share. As the data comes in to the appliance, it is written directly into the Media Server Deduplication Pool (MSDP). No additional step or process of writing the data to a standard disk partition and then moving it to the deduplication pool is necessary.

Any data that is initially ingested into a Universal Share resides in the MSDP located on the appliance-based media server that hosts the Universal Share. This data is not referenced in the NetBackup Catalog and no retention enforcement is enabled. Therefore, the data that resides in the Universal Share is not searchable and cannot be restored using NetBackup. Control of the data in the share is managed only by the host where that share is mounted.

Starting with appliance release 3.2, the Protection Point feature supports direct integration with NetBackup. A Protection Point is a point in time copy of the data that exists in a Universal Share. Creation and management of a Protection Point is accomplished through a NetBackup policy, which defines all scheduling and retention of the Protection Point. The Protection Point uses the Universal-Share policy, which can be configured through NetBackup web UI or through the NetBackup Administration Console. Once a Protection Point for the data in the Universal Share is created, that point in time copy of the Universal Share data can be managed like any other protected data in NetBackup. Protection Point data can be replicated to other NetBackup Domains or migrated to other storage types like tape or cloud, using Storage Lifecycle Policies. Each Protection Point copy is referenced to the name of the associated Universal Share.

See Creating a protection point for a NetBackup Appliance universal share.

See Creating a protection point for a universal share.

Restoring data from a Protection Point is exactly the same as restoring data from a standard client backup. The standard Backup Archive and Restore interface or the NetBackup web UI is used. The client name that is referenced for the restore is the Universal Share name that was used when creating the Standard policy type. Alternate client restores are fully supported. However, to restore to the system where the Universal Share was originally mounted, NetBackup Client software must be installed on that system. This is necessary since a NetBackup Client is not required to initially place data into the Universal Share.

NetBackup also supports a wide variety of APIs, including an API that can be used to provision (instant access) or create an NFS share that is based on any Protection Point point in time copy. This point in time copy can be mounted on the originating system where the Universal Share was previously mounted. It can be provisioned on any other system that supports the mounting of network share. NetBackup Client software is not required on the system where the provisioned share is mounted.