NetBackup™ for Cloud Object Store Administrator's Guide

Integration with NetBackup's role-based access control (RBAC)

The NetBackup Web UI provides the Default cloud object store Administrator RBAC role to control which NetBackup users can manage Cloud object store operations in NetBackup. You do not need to be a NetBackup administrator to manage Cloud object stores.

Management of Cloud object store accounts

You can configure a single NetBackup primary server for multiple Cloud object store accounts, across different cloud vendors as required.

Authentication and credentials

Wide emphasis on security. For protecting a single Azure Blob Storage account, the storage account and access key must be specified. To protect the Azure blob storage account, the supported authentication mechanisms are Access key, Service Principal, and Managed Identity. For all S3 API-compliant cloud vendors, the Access key and Secret Key are supported. For Amazon S3, the Access Key, IAM role, and Assume role (for cross-AWS account) mechanisms of authentication are supported.

For a complete list, see the NetBackup Compatibility Lists.

Backup policy

A single backup policy can protect multiple S3 buckets or Azure blob containers from one Cloud object store account.

Intelligent selection of cloud objects

Within a single policy, NetBackup provides flexibility to configure different queries for different buckets or containers. Some buckets or containers can be configured to back up all the objects in them. You can also configure some buckets and containers with intelligent queries to identify objects based on:

Fast and optimized backups

In addition to full backup, NetBackup also supports different types of incremental schedules for faster backups. Accelerator feature is also supported for the Cloud object store policies.

Enable checkpoint restart in the policy to be able to resume a failed or suspended job from the last checkpoint. You do not need to repeat the entire data transfer from the start of the job. This feature is not applicable for Dynamic multi-streaming backups.

Granular restore

NetBackup makes it easy to restore all objects in a bucket or container. It also lets you select which objects to restore by using a prefix, folder, or object-based views.

You can narrow down a selection of backup images for restoration in NetBackup by providing a date and time range.

Restore options

NetBackup restore the object store data along with their metadata, properties, tags, ACLs, and object lock properties.

NetBackup supports adding an arbitrary prefix to all objects when restoring. Consequently, it restores objects with a distinct name when it is desired to avoid any interference with the original objects. The Azure Data Lake files and directories, however, do not require a prefix. Instead, the files and directories are restored to a specified alternate location.

By default, NetBackup skips overwriting objects that already exist in the Cloud object store to conserve bandwidth and cloud costs. You can modify this default behavior by using the Overwrite option, thereby enabling the restoration of copies to overwrite the copies stored in the Cloud object store.

Alternate location restores

You can select restore objects to:

Support for malware scan before recovery

You can run malware scan of the selected files or folders for recovery as part of the recovery flow from Web UI and decide the recovery actions based on malware scan results.

Dynamic multi-streaming

This feature allows multiple backup streams to operate simultaneously for a single object store bucket/container, optimizing backup performance to meet the backup windows. Here are some advantages of Dynamic multi-streaming:

Scalability support for the backup host

NetBackup Cloud object store protection supports configuring the NetBackup Snapshot Manager as a scalable backup host for cloud deployments, along with the media server. If you have an existing NetBackup Snapshot Manager deployment in your environment, you can use that as a backup host for Cloud object store policies.

With NetBackup Snapshot Manager as the backup host, you do not need to configure multiple backup hosts for large jobs or create multiple policies to distribute the load across these backup hosts. Snapshot Manager can increase the number of data mover containers during a backup operation, and then reduce them when the protection tasks are completed.

Object lock

This feature lets you retain the original object lock properties and also provides an option to customize the object lock properties. If you use object lock properties on the restored objects, you can't delete those objects until the retention period is over, or the legal holds are removed. You can use the Object lock and retention properties without any configuration during policy creation and backup.

Quick object change scan

This feature significantly speeds up the NetBackup Accelerator resulting in faster backups.

Apart from an object's modification time, NetBackup also checks for changes in the object's tags and user attributes to determine whether the object qualifies for an incremental backup. In those application environments, where metadata changes do not occur after the objects are created, you can use this option to skip these metadata checks that significantly increases the backup speed.

Enabling this option speeds up change identification for Accelerator, as it skips the tags and attribute checks of the objects since the previous backup. However, the skipped objects are not backed up. Those object metadata changes which does not result in change in the modification time of the object are skipped.

For more information, see the Knowledge article:

https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/article.100073853.html

Backup host

A backup host is used for credential validation, backup, and recovery of the Cloud object store assets. You can configure a NetBackup media server as a backup host. NetBackup's object store agent resides on this backup host and interacts with various Cloud object store vendors and services. Starting NetBackup 11.0.0.1, you can configure a RHEL or SUSE media server as a backup host.

Object Change Tracking

Object store vendors provide mechanisms to track changes in buckets or containers for use cases such as auditing and inventory. NetBackup leverages these mechanisms to efficiently identify changed objects without scanning the entire bucket, significantly improving backup performance.