In search of the best means
In this article I will tell you how I met Quest Netvault Backup. About Netvault Backup, when this software still belonged to Dell, I have already heard a lot of positive feedback, but I have not had to “touch” it with my hands.
Quest Software, also known as Quest, is a software company headquartered in California with 53 offices in 24 countries. Founded in 1987. The company is known for its software used by database professionals, in cloud management, in information security, for data analysis, for backup and recovery. Quest Software was acquired by Dell in 2012. By November 1, 2016 the sale was completed and the company restarted as Quest Software.
Tightly get to know Quest Netvault was not so long ago. In one of the projects, the Customer asked to find an inexpensive and optimal solution to protect their infrastructure. The customer considered various backup software, one of the solutions was Quest Netvault Backup. According to the test results, taking into account the parameters important for the Customer (some of which are given at the end of the article), Quest Netvault Backup was chosen.
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In addition to the basic requirements, the Customer wanted the software to be installed on servers running Linux. Such requirements are not implemented by every backup software, but Quest Netvault Backup can do this.
The task that the customer set was to design a system that provides data backup in the amount of 62 TB. These data were contained in such application systems as SAP, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, etc. These application systems ran on physical and virtual servers running Microsoft Windows Server, Linux and FreeBSD operating systems. The virtual environment was built on the basis of the VMware vSphere virtualization platform. The infrastructure was located on the same site.
In general, the infrastructure of the Customer is shown in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 - Customer Infrastructure
In the course of the analysis, the possibilities of Quest Netvault Backup applicable to the Customer’s infrastructure were studied, namely: in terms of backup, recovery, management and monitoring of data. Typical functionality and principles of operation do not differ from other software vendors. Therefore, I further want to dwell on the features of Quest Netvault Backup, which distinguish it against the background of other backup tools.
Installation
The size of Quest Netvalt Backup is only 254 megabytes, which allows you to quickly deploy it.
Plug-ins for supported platforms and tasks are downloaded separately, but this has a positive effect on the target state of the system, which will have only the functionality that is necessary to protect a specific infrastructure and will not be overloaded with excessive features.
Control
Netvault is administered via the WebUI shell. Log in by name and password.
Figure 1.2 - Login Window to the Management Console
Connect to the web console from any computer on the network using a browser.
The WebUI uses a simple and friendly interface, administration does not cause any problems, the control logic is accessible and understandable, if there are questions, then the detailed documentation on the product is posted on the vendor’s website.
Figure 1.3 - WebUI Interface
WebUI is designed to manage and control Quest Netvault Backup and allows you to perform the following tasks:
Figure 1.4 - Storage Management
Figure 1.5 - Device Activity Monitoring
Storage devices
Quest Netvault easily implements storage rule 3-2-1, as it can work with devices for online backup storage (disk storage systems), as well as with devices for long-term storage (deduplicating devices, physical tape libraries, autoloaders, virtual tape libraries (VTL) and shared virtual tape libraries (SVTL)). Alienated backups can be stored in the cloud, on a remote site, or on alienable media (for example, on a tape drive).
When working with deduplicating devices, specialized protocols RDA and DD Boost are supported. Using these protocols:
Customers
Quest Netvault Backup supports more than three dozen platforms and applications. You can read more about the list on the vendor's website by reference (Figure 1.7). Checking the compatibility of versions of protected systems with the Quest Netvault Backup is carried out according to the official document “Quest Netvault Backup Compatibility Guide” located at the link .
Support for so many systems allows you to design solutions for complex Enterprise-level infrastructures. Clients are distributed in the form of plug-ins (similar to other vendors - agents), which are installed on servers. As a result, data is protected using a single system with a single point of control.
Figure 1.6 - List of plugins
After downloading the plugins for these platforms, we place them in a shared folder that we connect to Netvault and then install the plugins remotely on the protected servers.
Another one of the advantages I consider is the visibility of the selection of objects to be backed up. For example, in the figure below we select the state of the server system and the logical drive c: \ as objects.
And this figure shows the selection of hard disk partitions.
In addition to plug-ins for platforms running on separate servers, Quest Netvault Backup has plug-in versions with support for various cluster systems. In this case, the cluster nodes are grouped into a virtual client, on which the plugin is installed with cluster support. Cluster nodes will be backed up and restored through this virtual client. The table below shows the cluster versions of the plugins.
Table 1.2 Plugins with cluster systems
The project resulted in the deployment of a backup system based on the Quest Netvault Backup software with the architecture shown in Figure 1.8.
Figure 1.7 - Target system state
All components of Netvault Backup were deployed on a physical server with the following characteristics:
Operational backups were stored on Quest Qorestor Standard (back end 150TB). Work with Qorestor was carried out according to the RDA protocol. The deduplication rate at Qorestor at the end of the trial operation of the system was 14.7 to 1.
For long-term storage, a tape library with four LTO-7 standard drives was used. The tape library was connected to the backup server via SAS. Periodically, cartridges were alienated and moved to storage in one of the remote branches.
All necessary plugins were downloaded and placed on a network folder for remote installation. The deployment time and configuration of this system was nine days.
According to the results of the project, I can say that Quest Netvault Backup was able to fulfill all the requirements of the Customer and this solution is one of the means for building a backup system for both small companies and Enterprise-level Customers.
Most of the parameters that were used to evaluate solutions are given in the comparative table.
Table 1.3 - Comparison Table
The authors:
Mikhail Fedotov - Backup Systems Architect
Quest Software, also known as Quest, is a software company headquartered in California with 53 offices in 24 countries. Founded in 1987. The company is known for its software used by database professionals, in cloud management, in information security, for data analysis, for backup and recovery. Quest Software was acquired by Dell in 2012. By November 1, 2016 the sale was completed and the company restarted as Quest Software.
Tightly get to know Quest Netvault was not so long ago. In one of the projects, the Customer asked to find an inexpensive and optimal solution to protect their infrastructure. The customer considered various backup software, one of the solutions was Quest Netvault Backup. According to the test results, taking into account the parameters important for the Customer (some of which are given at the end of the article), Quest Netvault Backup was chosen.
')
In addition to the basic requirements, the Customer wanted the software to be installed on servers running Linux. Such requirements are not implemented by every backup software, but Quest Netvault Backup can do this.
Baseline and Requirements
The task that the customer set was to design a system that provides data backup in the amount of 62 TB. These data were contained in such application systems as SAP, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, etc. These application systems ran on physical and virtual servers running Microsoft Windows Server, Linux and FreeBSD operating systems. The virtual environment was built on the basis of the VMware vSphere virtualization platform. The infrastructure was located on the same site.
In general, the infrastructure of the Customer is shown in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 - Customer Infrastructure
In the course of the analysis, the possibilities of Quest Netvault Backup applicable to the Customer’s infrastructure were studied, namely: in terms of backup, recovery, management and monitoring of data. Typical functionality and principles of operation do not differ from other software vendors. Therefore, I further want to dwell on the features of Quest Netvault Backup, which distinguish it against the background of other backup tools.
Interesting features
Installation
The size of Quest Netvalt Backup is only 254 megabytes, which allows you to quickly deploy it.
Plug-ins for supported platforms and tasks are downloaded separately, but this has a positive effect on the target state of the system, which will have only the functionality that is necessary to protect a specific infrastructure and will not be overloaded with excessive features.
Control
Netvault is administered via the WebUI shell. Log in by name and password.
Figure 1.2 - Login Window to the Management Console
Connect to the web console from any computer on the network using a browser.
The WebUI uses a simple and friendly interface, administration does not cause any problems, the control logic is accessible and understandable, if there are questions, then the detailed documentation on the product is posted on the vendor’s website.
Figure 1.3 - WebUI Interface
WebUI is designed to manage and control Quest Netvault Backup and allows you to perform the following tasks:
- performance tuning, security and other parameters;
- management of customers, storage devices and media;
Figure 1.4 - Storage Management
- backup and restore;
- monitoring tasks, device activity and event logs;
Figure 1.5 - Device Activity Monitoring
- setting notifications;
- create and view reports.
Storage devices
Quest Netvault easily implements storage rule 3-2-1, as it can work with devices for online backup storage (disk storage systems), as well as with devices for long-term storage (deduplicating devices, physical tape libraries, autoloaders, virtual tape libraries (VTL) and shared virtual tape libraries (SVTL)). Alienated backups can be stored in the cloud, on a remote site, or on alienable media (for example, on a tape drive).
When working with deduplicating devices, specialized protocols RDA and DD Boost are supported. Using these protocols:
- reduces the network load and improves the performance of backup tasks, since the data is deduplicated on the client and only the necessary blocks are transferred. For example, working in conjunction with Quest Qorestor using the RDA protocol allows you to achieve performance up to 20 terabytes per hour and compression to 20 to 1;
- protects backups from encryption viruses. Even if the backup server itself is infected and encrypted, the backups will remain intact. link .
Customers
Quest Netvault Backup supports more than three dozen platforms and applications. You can read more about the list on the vendor's website by reference (Figure 1.7). Checking the compatibility of versions of protected systems with the Quest Netvault Backup is carried out according to the official document “Quest Netvault Backup Compatibility Guide” located at the link .
Support for so many systems allows you to design solutions for complex Enterprise-level infrastructures. Clients are distributed in the form of plug-ins (similar to other vendors - agents), which are installed on servers. As a result, data is protected using a single system with a single point of control.
Figure 1.6 - List of plugins
After downloading the plugins for these platforms, we place them in a shared folder that we connect to Netvault and then install the plugins remotely on the protected servers.
Another one of the advantages I consider is the visibility of the selection of objects to be backed up. For example, in the figure below we select the state of the server system and the logical drive c: \ as objects.
And this figure shows the selection of hard disk partitions.
In addition to plug-ins for platforms running on separate servers, Quest Netvault Backup has plug-in versions with support for various cluster systems. In this case, the cluster nodes are grouped into a virtual client, on which the plugin is installed with cluster support. Cluster nodes will be backed up and restored through this virtual client. The table below shows the cluster versions of the plugins.
Table 1.2 Plugins with cluster systems
| Plugin | Description |
|---|---|
| Plug-in for FileSystem | This plugin is used when setting up file system data backup on the following platforms: - Windows Server Clusters; - Linux clusters; - Sun clusters (Solaris SPARC) |
| Plug-in for Exchange | This plug-in is used when configuring backup of Microsoft Exchange server using Database Availability Group (DAG) technology. |
| Plug-in for Hyper-V | This plugin is used when setting up backup for a Hyper-V failover cluster. |
| Plug-in for oracle | This plugin is used when setting up Oracle Database backup on Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) |
| Plug-in for SQL Server | This plugin is used when setting up a backup of a Microsoft SQL Server failover cluster. |
| Plug-in for mysql | This plugin is used when setting up MySQL Server backup in a failover cluster. |
Result of implementation
The project resulted in the deployment of a backup system based on the Quest Netvault Backup software with the architecture shown in Figure 1.8.
Figure 1.7 - Target system state
All components of Netvault Backup were deployed on a physical server with the following characteristics:
- two processors with ten cores each;
- 64 GB of RAM;
- two hard drives SAS 300GB 10K (RAID1)
- four hard drives SAS 600GB 15K (RAID10);
- HBA with two external SAS ports;
- two ports of 10 gbps;
- OS CentOS.
Operational backups were stored on Quest Qorestor Standard (back end 150TB). Work with Qorestor was carried out according to the RDA protocol. The deduplication rate at Qorestor at the end of the trial operation of the system was 14.7 to 1.
For long-term storage, a tape library with four LTO-7 standard drives was used. The tape library was connected to the backup server via SAS. Periodically, cartridges were alienated and moved to storage in one of the remote branches.
All necessary plugins were downloaded and placed on a network folder for remote installation. The deployment time and configuration of this system was nine days.
findings
According to the results of the project, I can say that Quest Netvault Backup was able to fulfill all the requirements of the Customer and this solution is one of the means for building a backup system for both small companies and Enterprise-level Customers.
Most of the parameters that were used to evaluate solutions are given in the comparative table.
Table 1.3 - Comparison Table
| Criterion | Commult | IBM Spectrum Protect | Micro Focus Data Protector | Veeam Backup & Replication | Veritas netbackup | Quest netvault |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Windows OS support for backup server | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Microsoft Windows OS support for backup server | Not | Yes | Yes | Not | Yes | Yes |
| Multilingual interface | Yes | Yes | Not | Not | Yes | Yes |
| Functional WEB control interface | 6 out of 10 | 7 out of 10 | 6 out of 10 | 5 out of 10 | 7 out of 10 | 7 out of 10 |
| Centralized management | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Role-based administration | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for Microsoft Windows OS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for Linux OS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for Solaris OS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for AIX OS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for FreeBSD OS | Yes | Not | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for MAC OS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for Microsoft SQL | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for IBM DB2 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not | Yes |
| Agent for Oracle DataBase | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for PostgreSQL | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for MariaDB | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for MySQL | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for Microsoft SharePoint | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for Microsoft Exchange | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for IBM Informix | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for Lotus Domino Server | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not | Yes | Yes |
| Agent for SAP | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not | Yes | Yes |
| VMware ESXi support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Microsoft Hyper-V Support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Tape storage support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| DD boost protocol support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Catalyst protocol support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not |
| OST protocol support | Yes | Not | Yes | Not | Yes | Not |
| RDA protocol support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Encryption support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Client-side deduplication | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Server side deduplication | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| NDMP support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not | Yes | Yes |
| Usability | 6 out of 10 | 3 out of 10 | 4 out of 10 | 8 out of 10 | 5 out of 10 | 7 out of 10 |
The authors:
Mikhail Fedotov - Backup Systems Architect
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/444858/
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