ETI-NET – BackBox supports BoostFS; NonStop users can now leverage benefits of deduplication at the source

For the NonStop community the NonStop system is rarely a technology or application island. Typically, a NonStop system is deployed to support mission critical applications and as such, NonStop in some respects can be considered as just another server in the data center. Albeit, one focused solely on transaction processing, usually associated with handling the traffic coming from a multitude of customer facing devices, be they ATMs or POSs or even industrial robots whose end users are goods being assembled. In the world of transaction processing there is almost always complementary servers in addition to ancillary storage capabilities as through the years, it’s proved beneficial and indeed economical to deploy storage corporate wide.

When it comes to enterprise corporate storage there are many options available to IT organziations and when it comes to NonStop systems, there are products that can leverage the presence of corporate stage capacity including BackBox (BB) and virtualized BackBox (vBB). Irrespective of the NonStop platform supported – traditional or virtualized – BB supports a number of Corporate Backup Storage and Enterprise Backup Servers (EBS) and where backup is replicated to storage at a disaster recovery site, this is increasingly becoming a cloud consideration. Given the high propensity for networks to be part of the solution, any move to cut down on the volume of data being transported has considerable upside in both cost savings and overall performance.

ETI has now announced delivery of Data Domain BoostFS support for NonStop servers. Where data centers already have licenses for DDBoost they will have access to Boost File System (BoostFS) which out-of-the-box supports Windows. Today, ETI is extending this capability to include NonStop as ETI provides a NonStop resident plug-in for BB and vBB users. In so doing, BoostFS gives backup applications on a domain the ability to dedup the data to be backed up and transport directly from the domain to the corporate storage system. As ETI describes BB and vBB on NonStop, “a domain can be specific to a single system or common to a group of systems. BackBox Domain Manager software is installed, along with its associated media catalog, on the specific HPE NonStop system designated to control the domain. The BackBox Extractor software is installed on every HPE NonStop system in the domain.”

When it comes to dedup it’s all about the elimination of duplicate segments of data that is repetitive. In other words, once a unique segment of data is identified, all subsequent occurances are simply replaced by a reference to the initial occurance and by so doing, the prospect of moving 500 Mb of data can be reduced to a twentieth (or more)  of that and moving 25Mb of data takes fewer resources. There are three dedupe technologies currently in use and they include:

1. a) Post-dedupe (the oldest approach to dedupe); this is where you take your backup and, when it is finished, you do the dedupe. With this approach, dedupe is done at the target unit. That approach was popular with the old Virtual Library.
2. b) In-line dedupe; the dedupe is done on the fly at the same time as the backup is taken. Again, with this approach, dedupe is also done at the target unit.
3. c) Source dedupe; this is where the dedupe is done at the source. It is at the client where the dedup is performed prior to sending any data to the target unit (Data Domain DDBoost, HPE’s StoreOnce Catalyst, etc.).

“The client – in our case, the BackBox Virtual Tape Controller (BB VTC) –  performs the dedupe before sending data to the target unit,” said ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault. “This is the latest backup technology and as of today, the target unit can do tiering on different type of storage technologies including Cloud, an additional opportunity for ETI that will be covered a little later.” However, there is also another message for the NonStop community following the introduction of support for BoostFS and it’s all about allowing customers to better utilize their corporate storage. “It’s just another option that helps push our story of  better integration of NonStop with existing corporate technology,” said Tétreault  and, in so doing, “keeps the NonStop current with the latest backup technology used by todays IT organizations which, in this case, just happens to include as a target, the Dell / EMC / Data Domain enterprise corporate storage.”

“We cannot discount the value proposition of having the option to deploy BoostFS on NonStop,” concluded Tétreault. “We find that the corporate data center continues to evolve and even as IT considers NonStop just another server within the rows of racks of x86 servers that are now the topic of so many conversations among our NonStop customers, and having NonStop able to more readily transform to the world of Hybrid IT that HPE populizes wherever it presents to the IT industry, can only be beneficial to everyone in the NonStop community. We see the BB and vBB with BoostFs as potentially showcasing the flexibility of NonStop within Hybrid IT and with this option from ETI, NonStop users need not have reservations about the future of their NonStop systems within the enterprise.”

Should your plans include the consideration of backups going to corporate storage and would like to know more about BoostFS for BB and vBB, then ETI-NET would welcome a chance to talk with you about our product offerings in support of NonStop. Just call us or send us an email; we look forward to hearing from you!

Said Hini
said.hini@etinet.com (514) 663-0501
http://etinet.com/