Slim Down Cloud Spending—Just-In-Time Provisioning for Cloud Data Protection

Data Protection Infrastructure is no different whether it be on-premises or in today’s distributed cloud. If the instance size chosen for protecting cloud resources is a large instance, many computing resources are wasted during idle hours. The storage costs also contribute towards the overall budget. Cloud providers also provide various tiers of storage based on the speed and services available for their offering. Snapshots of Virtual Machine (VM) instances cost significantly more than using lower-cost object storage. We believe you pay only for what you use.

NETBACKUP CLOUD AUTOSCALING

NetBackup Cloud Autoscaling empowers you to have a predictable cost envelope when it comes to cloud data protection. For storage cost optimization, thin NetBackup clients read in the snapshot information and move the data to a supported NetBackup storage unit – this includes optimization savings from our deduplication engine and the ability to tier that data to any cloud storage. NetBackup 9.1 provides this functionally today for both Azure Stack and Azure resources protection using NetBackup CloudPoint Extension.

The above illustration (Figure 1) depicts automatically discovered cloud assets added to an intelligent group based on resource attributes or tag criteria, snapshot indexing using NetBackup Autoscaling client, followed by storing the data onto any configured NetBackup storage.

For compute optimization, the NetBackup thin client is implemented using Azure Kubernetes (K8s) cluster where the node pool Scale Method is set to Autoscale. Figure 2 below illustrates the Scale settings for both node size and node count range for an Azure K8s node pool. The administrator can define the maximum node count and node size for each node in the pool. This helps with establishing a predictable cost for compute resources in the cloud. A cost-conscious approach is utilized here to ensure additional nodes are spun up only after the K8s cluster has determined that the current node’s capacity has been reached.

For Azure Stack Hub, an on-premises host or VM compatible with NetBackup CloudPoint provider is sufficient for the thin client containers. In this scenario, additional thin clients are launched on the host VM to complete the data protection workflow.

Check out the short, video link attached to this blog for a demonstration. In the example, a snapshot backup of 70+ Azure cloud assets is initiated using an Azure Kubernetes Node Pool with 5 nodes configured as the maximum count. Before we initiate the backup, the node pool has only one node (thin client) running. Once the backups launch, all 5 nodes are operational in the Azure K8s cluster. A few minutes after the snapshot jobs have completed, the Azure node pool count drops back down to one.

Now organizations can stop pre-provisioning resources and running up cloud costs. Sustainability is a core value at Veritas, and when it comes to protecting cloud resources using NetBackup Cloud Autoscaling, organizations can be confident that they only have to pay for the cloud resources they use – nothing more, nothing less!

Tell us what you think about this feature in the NetBackup User Group. Better yet, try it out yourself. Download a copy of Veritas NetBackup 9.1 from our trialware page and see how easy it is to protect Azure resources. Existing customers can download a copy from the Veritas Download Center. Be sure to renew your Veritas maintenance and services to continue to get access to free support and upgrades, so you can make the most of your Veritas products. Renewing allows you to capitalize on the innovations in the latest releases as soon as they are available to keep your products up-to-date and operating as they should. It also allows you to leverage Veritas services to get the always-on, expert technical support required to quickly resolve issues. As a result, you extract more value from your Veritas investment, reduce your risks, so you can focus on your business. Learn more about Veritas maintenance and support at veritas.com/renewals.

Veritas NetBackup enables organizations of all sizes with robust, cloud-native technologies that protect your business on every step along the cloud transformation journey. Learn more about NetBackup at veritas.com/netbackup and watch this demo on Cloud Autoscaling.

For more NetBackup features, ask us questions in the comments, and stay tuned to more blogs or demos planned in our V-Bytes video series.