Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Electronic Design Automation > PowerScale: Best Practices for Semiconductor EDA Design Environments > Data protection strategies
At the core of every effective data protection strategy lies a solid business continuity plan. All enterprises need an explicitly defined and routinely tested plan to minimize 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 are fault tolerance, redundancy, snapshots, replication (local, geographically separate, or both), and backups to nearline storage, VTL, or tape.
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.
Two ways to measure cost compared to risk from a data protection point of view are:
Based on the table 1 above, short-term retention, which is usually based on snapshots is used for specific data sets to satisfy low recovery objective SLAs. For projects, and home directories, replication of data from the primary cluster to a target DR cluster, ideally located at a geographically separate location, is strongly recommended. NDMP backup to tape or VTL (virtual tape library) typically satisfies long-term high recovery objective, disaster recovery SLAs and any regulatory compliance requirements.
Below is a sample recommendation for different data types in semiconductor:
OneFS offers the SnapshotIQ for snapshots, and SyncIQ for replication and backups to another PowerScale cluster. OneFS also supports NDMP protocol for both a 2-way and 3-way backup configuration. The Dell suite of products include backup solutions that can be engaged in the overall data protection architecture. In addition, there are a number of 3rd-party backup applications that can utilize the SnapshotIQ feature to backup data on to Dell ECS Object Storage platform, Virtual Tape Libraries, physical tape devices or to public cloud. Each solution addresses specific business objectives for the protection of data.