Virtualization, the visualization of virtualization environments, ease of use as well as de-duplication of backup data from applications are a big deal in this release. We'll talk about those in a second but first a little background.
Today's data protection blast has a lot of good stuff in it but I want to focus on NetWorker in specific as the EMC NetWorker team do twenty (20) releases a year, the product does millions upon millions in revenue and yet sometimes I think I have a larger marketing budget than they do.
But that's the way now isn't it?
Cash cow products which consistently earn but aren't seen as that sexy don't get talked about as much and that's a shame as were I to think of a product which has flourished in recent years it would be NetWorker.
So what's in 7.5? This is something I should know as I beta tested it from the comfort of my hotel room a while back.
Well NetWorker now has a connection back to Virtual Center which means it'll auto-discover existing virtual machines as well as VMs you might create after you establish the connection. It can also connect to multiple Virtual Centers so you can monitor and protect multiple VMs spread across whatever number of ESX systems.
Locating those which aren't protected is one thing, visualizing the environment when you have VMs popping up all over the place is entirely another which is why NetWorker will now graphically map your virtual environment and show the various relationships and interdependencies so you can see what's what, what's clustered and what might have been VMotioned to another system.
It's not all VMware in this release as Hyper-V backup in now supported through the NetWorker Module for Microsoft Applications. NMM uses VSS for backup and recovery so not only can you backup and recover Hyper-V Guest operating systems but you get access to DR and granular restore of SharePoint farms as well Exchange backup with restore to the Exchange Recovery Storage Group so you can have a granular restore without the pain of a brick level backup.
I keep the NetWorker Command Reference printed out on my desk and in dead tree format it comes in at more than 470 pages of small text. This is important as NetWorker long had a pig of a user interface so if you wanted to get any real work done you opened up a terminal. The fact that the NetWorker Management Console and it's integrated configuration wizards makes NetWorker one of the best looking and easiest to use backup applications on the market shouldn't escape your notice.
The UI experience is clean and always evolving but maybe I'm a bit too attached to that as I've UI tested parts of it and always look forward to doing so as ease of use is something I'm always interested in.
De-duplication, that layer of magic dust which will cure all our capacity ills. Well, not really but it can help reign in sprawling growth of backup data. A few years ago EMC acquired Avamar only to watch it take off like a rocket and grow in the triple digits it's proven to be the right product with the right feature set at the right time, but one of the benefits Avamar also brought was that it was capable of adding de-duplication to NetWorker quite quickly.
Initially using NetWorker's plugin architecture de-duplication was implemented as an Application Specific Module (ASM) to the NetWorker save command. Sounds good, immediate de-dup but without have to do anything crazy like merge a hell of a lot of new code into the NetWorker code base but the drawback here of course was while you now had de-dup for unstructured file system data you didn't have de-dup for application backup data.
Well now there's a de-duplication framework for application modules which adds source based de-dup capability to the next release of application modules. This will be added to the application modules as they're updated.
There's more and even more of course and it's something I should swing back to in subsequent posts as there's always more than enough to talk about with NetWorker.
