It's no secret that Symantec plans to incorporate
thecontinuous data protection(CDP)assets it bought with
Revivio in November into its NetBackup product, but further details
were not made publicly available until now at the company's annual
Vision conference.According to Sean Macnew, senior director of the CDP and
replication product group for Symantec, the company's Continuous
Data Protection and Replication (CDP/R) product is currently being
developed as a "joint venture" between his group and the NetBackup
group. Each group, he said, has committed 10 engineers to the
project, and 10 engineers from Revivio are also part of the
team.
Symantec is planning to beta test the initial integration of the
CDP feature with version 6.0 of NetBackup in August. That
integration will allow NetBackup 6.0 users to request snapshots
from any point in time from the CDP/R repository. Configuration of
the CDP/R repository will be managed in its own separate console,
called CDP/R Recovery Manager.
"This way, if the storage administrator controls the CDP/R
repository, the NetBackup administrator can still take data from
it," Macnew said.
For the release of version 6.5.2 of NetBackup, slated for Jan.
2008, NetBackup's Enterprise Disk Foundation, which controls
policy-based lifecycle management features, will be able to request
point-in-time snapshots from the CDP/R repository and automatically
move them to other repositories. However, NetBackup 6.5 will not be
able to control the configuration of the CDP/R repository,
including which hosts and applications are protected using CDP.
Also, once the snapshot schedule is set within NetBackup, for
example, for a snapshot every four hours, the user would not be
able to retroactively change the policy and receive snapshots from
every two hours at a later time. The CDP/R repository will still
record every changed block, and applications will be recoverable
from any point in time, but only within the CDP/R repository in
that case.
According to Macnew, this is due to a fundamental difference
between the NetBackup and CDP/R interfaces. "NetBackup can only see
point-in-time objects," Macnew said, whereas CDP/R will be able to
see data grouped by application on an object-oriented basis.
"NetBackup will always need a quiesced, point-in-time view of a
backup image," Macnew said.
But, by the time NetBackup 7.0 is released (slated for 2009),
CDP/R Recovery Manager will become a "pane" within the NetBackup
management console. Once that happens, NetBackup will be fully able
to configure CDP/R and have an application-oriented view of its
backups.
"The CDP/R console will become part of a DR-oriented option
within the NetBackup management GUI," Macnew said.
Integration with Storage Foundation, Volume Manager, Veritas
Cluster Server
The next step after integration with NetBackup will be
integration with Storage Foundation version 6.0. This will allow
users to configure an application-oriented view of replication for
disaster recovery, and also make Symantec's replication more
granular using CDP, which functions at the block level, rather than
traditional replication, which functions at the byte level.
Symantec has changed the Revivio software so that CDP happens
asynchronously and out-of-band in order to avoid performance
bottlenecks in high-performing applications. In the first
integration with Storage Foundation, users will have to use a
host-splitter driver to send CDP data to the CDP/R repository.
However, by next year, there will be integration with Veritas
Volume Manager, which will eliminate the need for the separate
driver. Integration with volume manager will also mean that CDP
policies can be set by volume, rather than disk or LUN.
"It's easier to set up CDP at the volume level because the
volume level is the logical object you protect," Macnew said. "If
you're protecting by LUN or disk, as file systems grow,
administrators can forget to add new LUNs to the CDP group."
The final integration, Macnew said, will be with Veritas Cluster
Server (VCS), also slated for next year, in version 2.1 of CDP/R.
VCS has replication management as part of its Global Cluster
feature, and the integration will allow VCS to control CDP/R
replication. CDP/R will also be integrated with the VCS Fire Drill
feature, which will allow users to create virtual point-in-time
images for test environments without reserving storage space for
another snapshot.
Partner reaction
At least one of Symantec's business partners is not happy with
the timeline of integration with NetBackup -- even if it's as soon
as later this year. "They bought Revivio six months ago, and
Revivio already had a product on the market," said Mahesh
Vaidyanathan, senior manager, solutions architecture, for STME,
Symantec's largest channel partner in the Middle East.
"EMC [Corp.] is pushing Kashya, and [Network Appliance Inc.] is
pushing Topio," Vaidyanathan said. "We're quite keen on Symantec
having this product out, otherwise we may have to look for other
solutions to offer customers."
"In large enterprises, CDP is only just starting to find a
market," Macnew argued, adding that Symantec has had CDP for
smaller enterprises as part of Backup Exec, since October 2005. He
added, "Users don't want to buy another point solution; we don't
want to release this unless it's integrated with other
products."
New utilities for Storage Foundation
Also being discussed on the show floor at Vision were new
utilities coming for Storage Foundation in future releases,
including a new Linux installation utility, which is in the early
stages of development and is currently dubbed Prep Utility.
The utility will port all of Symantec's compatibility lists for
servers, operating systems and storage into a free software utility
that will be downloadable from Symantec's Web site, as well as
packaged with Storage Foundation, according to William Lang,
principal software engineer for Symantec, who is currently putting
together the code for the utility.
Storage Foundation has separate editions for Linux and Windows,
Lang said, and the Windows version has its own compatibility
discovery engine through Microsoft. "Eventually, we hope to put
compatibility information into Storage Foundation from all OS
types," said Jeff Martin, group product manager, storage and server
management group. "That's still a vision, though it's not known yet
what the technical challenges will be."
Still, Lang and Martin said they hope the new utility will
provide a "one-stop shop" for users looking for compatibility
information, rather than the process today, which requires
searching through Symantec's Web site for compatibility
information. The utility is also slated to include direct links to
"ReadMe" information about each product or patch in the
compatibility matrix.
Another feature that's coming will be a change to the Storage
Foundation dynamic multipathing (DMP) process, which currently
accesses third-party vendors' host bus adapter (HBA) drivers. The
next version of Storage Foundation, Martins said, will access SCSI
drivers in the server directly, improving performance.
Martin said Symantec is currently looking for users to
participate in focus groups and beta tests of the new Prep Utility
this summer. Interested users can contact
Symantec.