Conquer Your Challenges with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Dynamic NAS Protection
Wed, 16 Feb 2022 21:53:54 -0000
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Challenges when protecting NAS
For years, NAS and backup vendors have used Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) to protect NAS data. But NDMP has its own limitations, such as manual slicing of a NAS share to achieve multi-stream backup, limited parallel streams, and requires periodic full backups. Customers also face challenges to protect their growing amounts of data and to back up that data within their specified backup windows. With NDMP, full image restores are required for a file-level recovery and restore to any NAS device, such as NFS/CIFS, are not supported. These challenges lead to missed data protection and Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
PowerProtect Data Manager Dynamic NAS protection
Dell PowerProtect Data Manager for NAS protection addresses today’s customer challenges of protecting evolving NAS environments. In the PowerProtect Data Manager 19.9 software release, we introduced a new NAS data protection solution called Dynamic NAS protection. Unlike NDMP-based solutions, Dynamic NAS protection is a NAS-vendor-agnostic solution. With Dynamic NAS protection, customers can overcome some of the challenges they faced with NDMP.
Dynamic NAS protection addresses the challenges with the following capabilities:
- Vendor-agnostic solution for NAS protection
- Forever incremental backup
- High number of parallel streams and multiple virtual containers to address scale and performance
- Index, search, and restore
- Restore to any NAS device, such as NFS/CIFS
Dynamic NAS protection provides a non-NDMP, crawl- and backup-based solution by leveraging the NAS Protection Engine internally using Filesystem Agents (FSA) file based-backup (FBB) technology.
Dynamic NAS protection uses the NAS Protection Engine for backup and recovery orchestration. This solution is easy to use, providing automatic discovery, orchestration, and management through the Data Manager UI.
Data Manager for NAS protection solution supports all the Data Manager objectives such as DD Replication, Cloud Tier, progress monitoring, and SLA compliance.
Dynamic NAS protection - Intelligent auto slicer
The NAS file share auto slicer is a new library that is embedded in the Data Manager NAS agent. The slicer splits NAS assets (NAS share, a file system) into multiple sub-assets in preparation for multi-stream data movement to a Dell PowerProtect DD series appliance. Slices are created using parallel threads, and each slice is backed up concurrently using available NAS Protection Engine containers and moved to a PowerProtect DD series appliance.
The slicer partitions NAS assets dynamically before each backup. Based on backup history and changes in the content of the NAS asset being sliced, relevant slices are added, removed, or rebalanced. Periodically, unbalanced trees are automatically managed as content changes over time. No manual reconfiguration is required. The default slice size is 200 GB or 1 million files.
For a full backup, a complete share is traversed in parallel to create slices. For an Incremental backup, only modified slices are traversed based on backup history.
Auto distribution of backup streams
Dynamic NAS protection enables automated load balancing of protection engine hosts, and automatic scaling for containers to achieve maximum backup streams and reduce manual management overhead. The NAS protection containers spin up and tear down, depending upon the workload. Each NAS Protection Engine can run multiple containers. Each container is pre-installed with a NAS agent and an FSA agent.
Protecting NAS assets with Data Manager
With the Data Manager 19.9 software release, the Dynamic NAS solution supports protection for Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity, and Dell PowerScale (Isilon) NAS products, and any NFS or CIFS share using generic NAS for vendors such as NetApp, Windows, and Linux file servers.
Data Manager can protect NAS assets in two ways:
- Appliances: Automatic discovery of shares on supported Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity, and Dell PowerScale (Isilon) products.
- Shares: Network File System (NFS) and Common Internet File System (CIFS) shares from other NAS platforms.
Restoring the NAS assets with Data Manager
Data Manager provides support to restore a NAS asset to the original location or to an alternate location. Data Manager also supports FLR using the search engine to restore individual files and folders from NAS backups. Once the Search Engine is deployed and NAS protection policy is enabled with indexing, individual files and folders can be restored from one or more NAS backups by using the File Search option.
Data Manager for NAS protection supports the following restore use cases:
- Share-level restore
- Restore to any device, NFS or CIFS
- Restore to original and alternate NAS shares
- File-Level Recovery (FLR): NAS backups are indexed on the Search Engine for search and restore operations.
With many enhancements across our Dell data protection software offerings, Dell Technologies continues to drive innovation without compromise. We stop at nothing to give you technology innovations that modernize the protection of your NAS infrastructure.
Easily automate and optimize with Dynamic NAS protection available with Data Manager. With its snapshot technology and intelligent slicing, Data Manager protects NAS data efficiently within the required backup window. Dynamic NAS protection offers up to 3x faster backups[1] and up to 2x faster restores[2].
For more details on Data Manager Dynamic NAS protection, see the white paper Dell PowerProtect Data Manager: Dynamic NAS Protection and visit the Dell PowerProtect Data Manager web site.
Author: Vinod Kumar Kumaresan, Senior Engineering Technologist, Data Protection Division
[1] When comparing PowerProtect Data Manager 19.9 with Dynamic NAS protection backup performance to NDMP backup performance with Avamar. Based on Dell internal testing. August 2021.
[2] When comparing PowerProtect Data Manager 19.9 with Dynamic NAS protection restore performance to NDMP restore performance with Avamar. Based on Dell internal testing. August 2021.