A couple of weeks ago SEPATON demonstrated OpenStorage (OST) at Symantec Vision and I posted a blog entry including a link to the demo. I wanted to explore OST in more detail.
OST is Symantec’s intelligent disk interface. It works with all types of disk targets and is most commonly implemented with deduplication enabled storage. OST addresses disk as disk and is different from the traditional tape-based metaphor. It handles backups as images and allows the backup application to simultaneously read and write data and incrementally deleted expired information. OST enables access to NetBackups native disk features such as San Client Backups, Media Server Load Balancing, Intelligent Disk Capacity Management and Storage Lifecycle policies. These are features of NetBackup that can benefit end users and are outside the scope of this blog. In this post, I want to discuss the features that are unique to OST.
The challenge that end users grapple with is how to move or transform data using their backup appliance while maintaining NetBackup (NBU) catalogue consistency. This can be a particularly difficult when using appliance-based tape copy or replication. OST addresses these issues by enabling the appliance to access the NBU catalogue. This means that NBU can instruct the appliance to replicate a copy of the data and maintain separate retention policies on the two copies. Let’s look at these features in more detail: