Offsite Backup for NetApp Storage
The MDS Backup service provides remote storage to complement your storage infrastructure, offering all the advantages of disk-to-disk backup at a secure, offsite location.
Traditional backup schedules involve a full backup once per week or once per month, and incremental backups each day. There are 2 reasons why full backups are done so frequently:
Reliability: Since a full backup is required in order to restore from an incremental failure to restore the full backup due to media error or other causes renders all of the incremental backups useless when restoring the entire data set. Tapes used in traditional backup applications are offline storage; one can not be sure that the data on the tape is readable without placing the tape in a drive and reading from it. Even if each piece of tape media is individually read back and verified after being written, it could still fail after being verified, but before being restored.
This problem is usually solved by taking full backups more frequently, and by duplicating backup tapes. Duplication of backup tapes serves several purposes including providing an off-site copy of the backup and providing a second copy of the media in case one copy is bad: however, for certain types of problems it is possible that the bad data will simply be copied to both sets of tapes.
Speed of recovery: In order to restore a full data set, one must first restore a full backup, then restore each incremental backup, in order. If one performs full backups weekly and incremental backups daily, restores will typically involve a level-zero restore and up to 6 incremental restores. If one performs fewer full backups and more incrementals, restoring a full data set would take considerably longer.
MDS Backup solves both of these issues. We use NetApp SnapVault to ensure backup reliability by storing the backups on disk in a WAFL file system; they are protected by RAID, block checksums, and periodic disk scrubs, just like all other data on a NetApp storage system. Restores are quick and simple because each incremental backup is represented by a Snapshot, which is a point in time copy of the entire data set, and can be restored by a single operation.
For these reasons, only the incremental changes to a data set ever need to be backed up once the intial baseline copy has completed. This reduces load on the source, network bandwidth consumption, and overall media costs.
For more information read our overview or contact MDS...
