[Veritas-bu] Upcoming Release

I live and work in the Minneapolis MN area and last month VERITAS's
office in Roseville MN (where NetBackup is developed/tested/etc) had an
open house with a NetBackup 4.5 session. The info was given in an open
meeting, no NDAs. Here are my notes I sent around to coworkers upon
coming back from the session:

*******
I just came back from VERITAS in Roseville where they had an open
house. I went for their seminar on upcoming features of NetBackup 4.5
which will be released end of March 2002 (maybe). Here are some of 4.5's
new features:

1) You can limit ports you use via a firewall for backups via a new
daemon 'vnetd' (yawn)
2) Multiple copies ('inline copies') can be made simultaneously during
a backup. PROS: No further load on the client, much quicker than backup
& manual duplication (as we do now). CONS: Part of their 'vault'
product, is a separate purchase ($$), would use more drives during
backup.
3) True server-free backup. It can use HDS Shadow Image (or Volume
Manger snapshots, EMC TimeFinder, etc) to make a block-level copy of
data, but instead of sending it to another disk on the HDS Freedom box,
it tricks it to send the data to a tape drive. PROS: fast backups, very
little load on the server (as opposed to now; even with SAN backups),
extra HBAs just for tape traffic _should_ not be necessary CONS: even
though Shadow Image works with data created by NetWare, server-free
backup only works with Solaris (and HPUX & AIX), a 'quiessant' state is
still needed for the data on disk; ie applications would need to be
brought down temporarily to break the mirror. Restores would still be
done via the network.
4) VERITAS' lower-end product for NT and NetWare, Backup Exec, is
sort-of merging with NetBackup. Some of the terminology from Backup Exec
is going into NetBackup in 4.5 (ie, 'Backup Class' is 'Backup Policy'
and command line tools are following: bppllist instead of bpcllist,
etc.). Backup Exec will shortly be called 'NetBackup Exec'. You can
still use the old cli tool's old names.
5) NetBackup 4.5 will have a NetWare media server available; ie,
NetWare boxes could have direct SCSI connections to a different tape
library (or use some of the drives). On the back-end it is actually
modified Backup Exec! I don't know how duplications would work in this
environment, but it is something we might want to seriously look into.
The STK 9710 could perhaps be used solely by NetWare, while remaining
part of the same backup system. The NetWare box would appear to
NetBackup as an NDMP server.
6) 'Storage Groups' allow easier management of where backups go to if
you have multiple media servers & robotics.
7) 24 retention levels vs. 8 now (yawn)
8) Way improved java & Windows GUIs
9) The java Job Monitor is horrendously faster because a new daemon
sends just the job information that has changed
10) The NetBackup database is decreased in size significantly. The
ASCII files which currently show which files were backed up (the *.f
files) are changed to a new binary format. Some tests show NetBackup DB
sizes decreasing 60%. A binary is included to 'cat' the binary files
(cat_db or something). During the 3.4 -> 4.5 upgrade you can choose to
keep the current format, but use the new format going forward, or have
it convert your old '.f' files during install.
11) You can specify media servers as 'MEDIA_SERVER' in the bp.conf so
that you don't accidently overwrite global NetBackup configurations from
a media server.
12) BpVault is a license key add instead of a wholey separate VERITAS
Consulting cash cow (err, product). Also, its functionality is in
binaries instead of scripts.

That's about it.

Regards,
*********************************************

You think I would have sent this to you last month....

Regards,

RCA

--
Ryan C. Anderson
Unix Administrator
United Defense L.P.
desk 763.572.6684
pager 952.235.9936

>>> <scott.kendall AT abbott DOT com> 01/09/02 11:08AM >>>

I've heard that vault will be much more integrated into the product
instead of
just being some scripts ran on the side, but I believe it's still an
add-on
option you have to purchase separately (turn on with a license key).

- Scott

I have been looking for information about the upcoming release of
Netbackup
Datacenter.

I was told that it may be ready this year, it will include BPVault. Can
anyone
list some of the major changes or addition that will be included?

Thank you!

Will
--

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