NetBackup Flex Scale: Highly Scalable and

Space Efficient.

A Veritas and Broadcom study into how to

defragment backups and efficiently protect billions
of EDA files and other enterprise data

Executive Summary Efficiently Protecting EDA workloads

Broadcom is a global technology leader that designs,
develops, and supplies a broad range of semiconductor and
infrastructure software solutions. Amongst other things their
data centers include a blend of virtual machines, databases
and NAS storage. Like most companies, they know that
when it comes to protecting Electronic Design Automation
(EDA) workloads it is important to protect the most critical
assets during the design and test phase. During the design Figure 1. NetBackup Flex Scale protecting EDA workloads
in both design, test and verification
phase millions of files are created, compiled, tested and
verified. A typical EDA design and test environment consists
of the following components:
NetBackup Flex Scale is a hyperconverged scale-out data
• Software Control Management (SCM) server and
protection solution that protects over 800 different data
storage – manages, organizes and version controls
sources from any source with a consistent NetBackup
changes in documents, code and other artifacts
experience. It scales from 448 TB to 1.8 PB of local storage
during development.
with the option to add over 60 different cloud storage targets
• Home directories – workspaces for developers. or tape. It simplifies management with automation of

• Physical and Virtual Machines –machines used infrastructure tasks such as initial configuration (including

during testing and verification of designs.
Veritas and Broadcom partnered on a study to identify the
ideal way to efficiently backup the billions of files in a typical
EDA workload and remove fragmentation from siloed
solutions is daunting. That is where NetBackup Flex Scale
comes in.
yaml support), scaling and technology refreshes. The
architecture was designed as a containerized solution which
allows nodes to run multiple NetBackup services and
provides service mobility, enabling fast failovers, upgrades,
and rollbacks. Management can be done using REST APIs or
the web UI.
NetBackup Flex Scale was designed from the ground up to
provide high levels of performance, storage efficiency and
enterprise resiliency that is essential for EDA workloads.
Some design elements that provide this include:
Performance:
• Dynamic NAS support which optimizes backup and
recovery for NAS storage. It includes:
Dynamic NAS Support
Figure 2. NetBackup Flex Scale cluster with Dynamic NAS
support for faster backup and recovery of NAS storage
Intelligent insights that continuously load balances
streams across all nodes in the NetBackup Flex Scale
cluster resulting in faster backup and recovery of EDA
data stored in NAS storage.
o Autonomous discovery and protection of
NAS resources
o Intelligent insights that continuously load
balances across the nodes
o Continuous stream balancing across nodes
o Dynamic multi-stream backup from
snapshots
o Change file tracking, works with NAS
platform to quickly identify new and
modified data to minimize scan time
during backup operations
o Rollback restore which allows you to
recover from a “rolled back” snapshot,
which provides super-fast recovery because
no data movement is required.
o Option for a full or granular recovery.
o Checkpoint restart for failed jobs
o Data Portability allowing you to restore
anywhere including to the cloud or another
NAS device.
• A 50 GbE high-speed cluster interconnect network
that leverages UDP, providing 60% greater
network bandwidth than TCP.
• Options for process prioritization that can minimize
impact to workload performance during
infrastructure tasks like adding and replacing nodes.
Storage Efficiency and Performance
• Block-based erasure coding that reduces
background processing and eliminates resource
intense jobs like garbage collection and replication
to erasure coding conversion.
This also leverages a symmetric approach to the
Reed-Solomon erasure coding algorithm that takes
advantage of processor optimizations that reduce
compute overhead.
• The deduplication engine provides storage savings
up to 95% for both local and cloud-based storage.
Enterprise Resiliency
• Resiliency that scales and protects against multiple
concurrent failures including 2 nodes or any 4 disks.
• Rapid recovery of data durability levels after node or
disk failures by employing the full resources of the
cluster.
• Options for replication between sites for protection
against full site-wide failures.
Test Environment
The test environment consisted of a six node NetBackup Flex
Scale cluster with 612 TB total usable capacity. We tested a
variety of workloads including a blend of virtual and physical
machines, databases and NAS.
Testing Conclusions
Veritas and Broadcom performed a variety of workload any new VMs matching this criterion to automatically be
testing of the NetBackup Flex Scale solution for scalability discovered and backed up in the future.
and space efficiency of Broadcom’s data. We performed both full and single file restores of the virtual
machines.
Testing included:
• Initial install and configuration
NetBackup Flex Scale offers a simple way to manage
• Backup and restore of:
o Virtual machines enterprise data protection and scale-out both storage and
o Physical servers compute resources to remove the fragmentation that
o Databases
o NAS data (EDA) otherwise exists across deployments. By simply adding
• Scaling the cluster nodes the cluster’s built in automation can scale the cluster
All testing concluded satisfactorily protecting all workloads from 448 TB to 1.8 PB of capacity.
highly efficiently.
To test this, we added an additional node while active
backup/recovery operations were in progress. We found this
to be extremely easy; the cluster’s built-in automation scaled
the cluster and did not interfere with ongoing backup and
recovery jobs.
We used the dynamic NAS feature within NetBackup which
In conclusion, together Broadcom and Veritas were able to
when shares are added to NAS storage systems
successfully test a variety of workload tests in an EDA
automatically:
environment on NetBackup Flex Scale and found that it
• discovers the new shares,
could protect all workload highly efficiently. The use of
• dynamically creates additional streams and
dynamic NAS built into the product significantly optimized
• initiates backup jobs.
the backup and recovery of the EDA data. The highly
In our testing we observed the streams were automatically
efficient dedupe engine provided 95% storage savings.
distributed, and load balanced across all the nodes in the
Click here for more information on NetBackup 9 including
cluster.
Dynamic NAS or NetBackup Flex Scale.
NetBackup provided agentless backups of our virtual
machines. The VMware virtual machines were discovered
using an intelligent policy which allows auto-selection of
virtual machines based on a defined criterion. This allows for

ABOUT VERITAS
Veritas Technologies is a global leader in data protection and availability. Over 50,000 enterprises—including 99 of the Fortune 100—rely on us to
abstract IT complexity and simplify data management. Veritas Enterprise Data Services Platform automates the protection and orchestrates the recovery
of data everywhere it lives, ensures 24/7 availability of business-critical applications, and provides enterprises with the insights they need to comply with
evolving data regulations. With a reputation for reliability at scale and a deployment model to fit any need, Veritas supports more than 500 data sources
and over 150 storage targets, including 60 clouds. Learn more at www.veritas.com. Follow us on Twitter at @veritastechllc.

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