About OpenStorage optimized synthetic backups
One of the capabilities a vendor may expose is the disk appliance's potential to construct synthetic backup images. A media server uses messages to instruct the storage server which full and incremental backup images to use to create the synthetic backup. The storage server constructs (or synthesizes) the backup image directly on the disk storage. The backups that NetBackup creates in this way are known as optimized synthetic backups.
The OpenStorage optimized synthetic backup method provides the following benefits:
Faster than a synthetic backup.
Regular synthetic backups are constructed on the media server. They are moved across the network from the storage server to the media server and synthesized into one image. The synthetic image is then moved back to the storage server.
Requires no data movement across the network.
Regular synthetic backups use network traffic.
Uses fewer disk resources, depending on the vendor implementation.
The storage vendor determines the storage implementation. If the disk appliance uses data deduplication, duplicate data is not created and stored.
In NetBackup, the Optimizedlmage attribute enables optimized synthetic backup. It applies to both storage servers and disk pools.
If the original vendor plug-in exposed optimized synthetic backup functionality, the storage server and disk pools inherited that functionality. However, if your OpenStorage vendor updates their plug-in to add optimized synthetic backup functionality, you have to update NetBackup.
See Adding OpenStorage functionality to an existing environment.
The following table describes the requirements and limitations for OpenStorage optimized synthetic backups.
Table: OpenStorage optimized synthetic backups requirements and limitations
| What | Description |
|---|---|
|
Requirements |
The following are the requirements for optimized synthetic backups:
|
|
Limitations |
NetBackup does not support storage unit groups as a destination for optimized synthetic backups. |