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At the core of every effective large cluster data protection strategy lies a solid business continuance plan. An explicitly defined and routinely tested procedure is key to minimizing the potential impact to the workflow when a failure occurs or in the event of a natural disaster. There are several ways to address data protection and most enterprises adopt a combination of these methods, to varying degrees. Among the primary approaches to data protection at scale are fault tolerance, redundancy, snapshots, and replication. Some of these methods are biased towards cost efficiency but have a higher risk associated with them, and others represent a higher cost but also offer an increased level of protection.
More information is available in the Data Availability and Protection paper.
Despite support for parallel NDMP and native 2-way NDMP over Fibre Channel, traditional backup to VTL or tape is often not a feasible DR strategy at the large or extra-large cluster scale. Instead, replication is usually the preferred tool of choice.
Further information is provided in the Dell PowerScale: NDMP Technical Overview and Design Considerations white paper.
For large clusters, snapshots typically provide the first line of defense in a data protection strategy with low recovery objectives. OneFS SnapshotIQ affords the following benefits:
Further information is available in the Data Protection with Dell PowerScale SnapshotIQ white paper.