In NetBackup there are multiple types of storage devices used for backup and restore process. One of the mostly used storage type is Disk Pool which we’ll discuss about.
NetBackup support storage types like Basicdisk, AdvancedDisk, OpenStorage and PureDisk however there is another storage which is DiskPool and it is supported used widely. Lets discuss further about DiskPool further.
A Storage array with multiple disk is called disk enclosure in NetBackup. Each logical unit presented to server operation system is considered as a disk volume. NetBackup has a concept of using multiple disk volumes together and it is referred as DiskPool and NetBackup considers it as a single entity which is presented for backup policy destination.
NetBackup uses OpenStorage technology or the OpenStorage API to communicate with media server which can a physical server and storage server which is responsible for reading and writing data to storage hardware. In some cases media server and storage server would be two different systems however in the case of AdvancedDisk and NetBackup Deduplication media server and storage server both are same.
Advantages of Pooling Disk resources
There are several advantages of pooling disk resources such as ease of managing multiple disk volume as a single disk entity. Also, helping in media server load balancing and storage life cycle along with spanning backs to multiple disk volumes automatically. It also helps in scaling up the disk pool as the disk volumes can easily be added to it.
What is Advanced Disk disk pool and storage units?
Here we see that there are three media server in the top row. Media server M1 connected to two disk arrays, Media server M2 has its own internal storage and NetBackup Appliance 5330-1 is connected to an external storage shelves. Here the media server is performing the job of storage server itself.
Since Media M1 has two disk enclosures we can take all the disk volumes of both disk enclosures and present as a single storage entity or we can also configure single – single disk pool and present to NetBackup for data backup. In case Media server M2, its internal disks would be configured as a single disk pool and it would be considered a single disk pool storage for backups.
In NetBackup Appliance we can decide to use some of the drives to be used specifically for AdvancedDisk disk pool and it would also be considered as a single storage storage unit for backup destination.
Also check:
How to configure NetBackup storage unit and Storage device
What is Veritas NetBackup 7.7 and how it works?
…………………………………………….