EMC NetWorker Design Best Practices with Data Domain

In today’s IT industry where information is crucial to company business growth, protecting the data against loss has become very critical. Even with the development of more cost effective technologies, completely and effectively protecting what is inevitably multiple copies of the same information is a major challenge for many businesses. Standard practices and technologies are being pushed to their limits in many backup environments, most to an unsuccessful or inefficient outcome. This challenge is common for many EMC NetWorker customers, and finding the right new technology to bridge the gap between current state and desired state is often a long, difficult process. Data Domain provides an alternative near line storage solution for NetWorker customers who are faced with never_ending data growth and unabated storage expansion associated with ballooning backup and archive data. While NetWorker is one of the most scalable data protection solutions available to the market, data growth and data retention requirements drive near_continual expansion to NetWorker pools. The scope of this whitepaper focuses on how the Data Domain deduplication storage solution integrates with standard NetWorker architectural and operational environments in order to overcome the growing gap between what is actually being accomplished and what needs to be accomplished.

The NetWorker Architecture and Terminology
The EMC NetWorker client / server environment provides the ability to protect your enterprise against the loss of valuable data. In a network environment, where the amount of data grows rapidly as servers are added to the network, the need to protect data becomes crucial. The EMC NetWorker product gives you the power and flexibility to meet such a challenge.
Each NetWorker server instance is supported by multiple self_managed relational databases (resource, client file index and media) and various logs. Historically, customers backed up data directly to tape for nightly backups. Alternatively, more customers have moved to using file and advanced file type devices to backup data to disk for faster write speeds. This data is then migrated daily to physical tape as a replica of the original data (commonly referred to as “clone” data) for purposes of disaster recovery and media recovery. Common terminology used in this whitepaper is provided in the following table.

Data Domain Architecture and Models
A base Data Domain system supports a certain capacity of addressable storage (post_RAID, post_spares). Based on backup policy, this will enable 10x_30x more logical capacity. For example, a system that offers 10TB of addressable capacity would offer 100TB to 300TB of logical capacity.
Each Data Domain system instance supports 200MB/sec average throughput. This base metric applies both to read and write operations, as the architecture is optimized for sequential I/O. The solution scales modularly by incrementally adding either capacity to an existing Data Domain system instance in the case of the DD580 or the DDX, or adding a new Data Domain system instance to the NetWorker production environment. Multiple Data Domain system instances can be racked and managed through an enterprise console; however logical management of each Data Domain system instance is still required. The following figure illustrates Data Domain system architecture scalability.

File System and VTL Integration
Data Domain systems support two integration methods with NetWorker, either via network file system mounts or as a standalone Virtual Tape Library (VTL). Data Domain systems can run in a mixed mode capacity, providing both interface methods concurrently to one or many NetWorker server instances. This flexibility affords a great number of integration scenarios for NetWorker. The following figure illustrates both integration scenarios with NetWorker Servers and Storage Nodes.