As unstructured data continues to grow exponentially, organizations face the daunting task of ensuring the protection of critical data on network attached storage (NAS) systems. In many cases, backup windows and budgets are shrinking as well.

Traditional backup solutions typically rely on full and incremental backups that are scheduled to run regular jobs. Unfortunately, the full backups often extend beyond the available backup window, which may result in unprotected data. If only a portion of a large file has changed, an incremental backup may take as long as a full backup because the whole file must be backed up. Traditional backup limitations can lead to data loss, declining user productivity, and constrained NAS system performance.

If the primary NAS system fails and data is not replicated to the secondary NAS system, there may be data loss on the primary NAS system. However, large amounts of data and limited WAN bandwidth can make data replication difficult. Some applications use snapshots, but snapshots are not a substitute for a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy.

Organizations require an appropriate balance of performance, reliability, management, and cost to meet their recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

This document describes how Dell PowerScale NDMP backup solutions help organizations meet these requirements and understand NDMP best practices.