Benefits of universal shares
NetBackup's universal share feature provides flexibility, scalability, ease of recoverability to DBAs, all while providing the benefits of existing space-optimized data protection with MSDP. The feature provides support for millions of files per share, and scalability for multi-TB databases. These shares use the same deduplication pool as existing backups. Therefore, all data, whether from the shares or direct to the pool, realizes deduplication benefits. Universal share data is written to the same MSDP location that is used by all other backup activities. All data that is sent to an MSDP-based storage unit or to a universal share will coexist in the same MSDP pool. This optimization is transparent to DBAs.
Protection points facilitate data persistence, data retention, and indexing of the data within the NetBackup primary catalog. They provide single file search and recovery, as well as the ability to conduct secondary operations like replication and optimized duplication. Recovery is flexible. It does not affect existing universal shares. The data is referenced by share, not by media server. Even though the central MSDP pool is used for all shares on a media server, data that is placed in any given share is not visible or accessible by any other share.
Although the universal share feature has existed in previous versions, it required the use of a NetBackup Appliance. However, that support has expanded in NetBackup 9.1 to include build-your-own (BYO) media servers. The universal share feature is supported on an MSDP BYO storage server with NetBackup 9.1 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 and later.
Furthermore, support for universal shares has been extended to the NetBackup Flex Appliance platform as of Flex version 2.0.1 while running NetBackup application instances at version 9.1 or later.