ExaGrid Supports Optimized Synthetic Backups with Symantec NetBackup

Backup administrators use a variety of methodologies and technologies when backing up data.  Combining traditional synthetic backups with appliances that are capable of optimizing them gives backup administrators a powerful weapon in their battle to keep ahead of ever-expanding data protection needs.

ExaGrid was recently named the first third-party deduplication appliance to be certified by Symantec for Optimized Synthetic Backups with NetBackup. Optimized Synthetics use metadata to create a roadmap for recovering a full backup without actually doing the data movement to rebuild the full. ExaGrid’s support for optimized synthetic backups was built under the Symantec OpenStorage API integration (OST). Let’s take a look at the benefits of this integrated solution.

Traditional Synthetic Backups

Synthetic backups have been around for a while. They “stitch together” a full backup with all its subsequent incremental backups to “synthesize” a full backup. However, this operation represents a lot of data movement and backup application and hardware bandwidth consumption.

Optimized Synthetic Backups

Optimized synthetic full backups take a different approach to the problem. They eliminate that bandwidth and server load penalty by synthesizing a new “full” from a previous (“real”) full and a series of previously-done differential incremental backups. Symantec OpenStorage technology enables ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication system to achieve the high level of integration with NetBackup needed to create optimized synthetic backups. The benefits to this approach are as follows:

• Reduced backup windows from elimination of full backups
• Reduced backup application load
• Improved RTOs and RPOs
• Reduced replication bandwidth

Optimized synthetic cumulative incremental backups allow a low-cost cumulative incremental backup to be synthesized from a series of previously-done differential incremental backups.  The optimization provided by the manipulation of metadata alone allows backup administrators to drastically reduce the frequency of those time and resource-costly full backups. Instead, they can perform many days of fast, resource-friendly differential incremental backups plus a fast, resource-friendly daily optimized synthetic full backup. This concept is illustrated below: 

As this figure illustrates, the optimized synthetic full is the accumulation of all the metadata from the Day 1 full backup plus Day 2-5 differential incremental backups (just the changes). 

The various pieces of protected data are tracked via metadata, and these are used to optimize the construction of the synthetic full (or the cumulative incremental).  No data is moved when constructing the synthetic full, since it is already safely stored on the advanced disk-based backup appliance. Only the references to the actual data are manipulated. Full recovery from that optimized synthetic full backup leverages the metadata references to bring back only the data required.


To learn more about ExaGrid's support for Optimized Synthetic Backups with NetBackup, download our free whitepaper "Exploiting Metadata to Optimize Synthetic Backups."