Enhanced Cyber Resiliency, Increased Scalability and SAN Transport Support, Some of Many Benefits In NetBackup Flex Scale 3.2

Protection March 25, 2024
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NetBackup Flex Scale 3.2 comes with some exciting enhancements that make managing your private and hybrid cloud data protection solution even easier.  These enhancements can be grouped into the following categories.

Enhanced Turnkey Cyber Resiliency Enhancements

As with all releases of NetBackup-powered appliances, we continue to enhance our security features.  In this release, we added:

  •  A security meter that provides instant insight into the cluster’s security posture with hotlinks to easily enable additional security features.  
  • Support for an isolated recovery environment (IRE) is referred to as a virtual air-gapped copy on WORM storage. The network access to data in the isolated recovery environment is available only during the replication window, otherwise, the air-gapped copy is protected against malware and ransomware attacks.

Unlike traditional push replication methods, NetBackup Flex Scale works by utilizing a pull model which means the replication request comes from the IRE during an admin-specified replication window. By empowering the IRE destination environment to request the data from the source environment—by invitation only, we can support 24x7 data movement while isolating the stored data from any potential threats. (see image below)

  • Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), adds a second layer of security beyond password protection with an option to enforce.
  • Single Sign-on (SSO) is supported for any SAML 2.0 compliant identity providers.
  • External password management using CyberArk’s Privileged Access Management, to enforce password rotation policies and privileged session activity and monitoring.
  • System log forwarding to an external log management server, providing administrators a centralized location for viewing logs and for further analysis and troubleshooting.

Additional Workload Support

To decrease the network traffic and load on the production ESX server as well as increase the speed of backup and recovery operations this release adds additional support for:

  • Fibre channel (initiator mode) adding direct support for VMware SAN transport and tape-out, enabling data to be transferred over the Storage Area Network rather than the Local Area Network. With the intelligent load balancer and scale-out architecture, Fibre Channel transport provides the highest performance with linear scale for your large VMware environments and tape needs.

Data Domain OST plugin support, allowing NetBackup to optimally utilize the Data Domain storage array for storing backup images.

Increased Scalability

This release introduces two new models of hardware that provide greater capacity.

  • 16 TB models provide up to 2.05 PB of local storage in a single cluster
  • 20 TB models support up to 2.56 PB of local storage in a single cluster
  • Both models support up to an additional 8.8 PB of cloud storage for a maximum single cluster 11.4 PB capacity

Greater Simplicity

Ensure a smooth and easy install with the integrated environmental prechecks added to the deployment wizard to validate that networking and configuration details meet the requirements before initiating an install.

Improved Supportability

Capture more relevant log files faster, easily make network modifications to enable data center migrations and increase secondary network resiliency.

Summary

NetBackup Flex Scale 3.2 is packed with enhancements to increase your cyber resiliency, support faster backup and restores, increase scalability and simplicity as well as improved supportability. 

For a complete list of what’s new in NetBackup Flex Scale 3.2 check out the release notes.

For more information reach out to your local Veritas representative and check out these technical overview and security whitepapers.

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Sandra Moulton
Dir, Solutions Architect
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