How to work with universal shares
The universal share feature provides a network-attached storage (NAS) option for supported Cohesity appliances as well as the software-only deployment of NetBackup. Traditional NAS offerings store data in conventional, non-deduplicated disk locations. Data in a universal share is placed on highly redundant storage in a space efficient, deduplicated state. The deduplication technology that is used for this repository is the same MSDP location used by standard client-based backups.
Any data that is stored in a universal share is automatically placed in the MSDP, where it is deduplicated automatically. This data is then deduplicated against all other data that was previously ingested into the media server's MSDP location. Since a typical MSDP location stores data across a broad scope of data types, the universal share offers significant deduplication efficiency. The protection point feature lets you create a point-in-time copy of the data that exists in the specified universal share. Once a protection point is created, NetBackup automatically catalogs the data as a specific point-in-time copy of that data and manages it like any other data that is ingested into NetBackup. Since the protection point only catalogs the universal share data that already resides in the MSDP, no data movement occurs. Therefore, the process of creating a protection point can be very fast.
The universal share feature supports a wide array of clients and data types. NetBackup software is not required on the client where the share is mounted. Any operating system that uses a POSIX-compliant file system and can mount a CIFS or an NFS network share can write data to a universal share. As the data comes in to the universal share, it is written directly into the Media Server Deduplication Pool (MSDP). No additional step or process of writing the data to a standard disk partition and then moving it to the deduplication pool is necessary.