The Virtual Storage Guy

Backup: Collateral Damage on the Journey to the Cloud

Last week I introduced you to SnapProtect, our unified business continuance suite that leverages NetApp’s hardware-accelerated data protection capabilities to enhance and simplify business continuance processes.

I believe the best way to share all of the goodness we have to offer with SnapProtect is to begin by reviewing the current state of business continuance. With a common point to communicate from, I’ll proceed into our integrated data protection technologies and additional partner solutions in follow-on posts.

Let’s get started…

Business Continuance is Backup & Disaster Recovery

I want to begin by asking you to look at backup and disaster recovery (DR) as two ends of the business continuance spectrum. Both functions provide processes and procedures as a means to return an application, or set of applications, to a normal operational state in the event of corruption, loss or disaster.

What truly separates backup from DR is the costs associated with each process. On a per copy basis, backup is much less expensive, and as such is the standard data protection process for all systems. By contrast DR is very expensive, which commonly relegates its use to a select set of applications and systems.

Outside of the desire for applications, systems, and facilities to never go offline, businesses truly only care about restoring services as quickly as possible. The means of recovery is irrelevant, it can be accomplished from either backup or DR.

Time is money.

Backup is Broken

Introducing NetApp SnapProtect Backup

Over the past 5 years, server virtualization has changed the data center forever and these changes have had a far-reaching impact on data center architectures and operations. One of the areas often discussed as having been affected, is the ever increasing shared storage footprint. I’d suggest to you, that in my customer engagements storage costs are concern 1A closely followed by concern 1B, backup and recovery.

The shared physical infrastructure required with server virtualization has made completion of backup operations difficult. These challenges have led us to reevaluating how we accomplish business continuance goals, and the most logical place to start is the area with the most pain; backup and recovery. Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant report for Enterprise Disk-Based Backup & Recovery highlights the changes customers are facing and reinforces change is in tow.

• By 2014, at least 30% of organizations will have changed backup vendors due to frustration over cost, complexity and/or capability.
• By 2014, 80% of the market will choose advanced, disk-based appliances and backup software-only solutions over distributed VTLs.
• By 2014, deduplication will cease to be available as a stand-alone; rather, it will become a feature of broader data storage and data management solutions.

In order to increase our ability to meet the business continuance goals of today and tomorrow NetApp has announced the release of SnapProtect. The SnapProtect management software is our latest backup and recovery application that enables businesses to combine the benefits of our integrated data protection and storage efficiency technologies with applications and virtual infrastructures, provides a backup catalog supporting disk backups and tape archives, and provides the framework for enhanced disaster recovery capabilities (enabled by our virtualization partners) that are truly unmatched in the industry.

SnapProtect provides a plethora of capabilities that are too much for a single post to cover, so for today allow me to introduce you to some of the core constructs of SnapProtect.

The Industry’s Fastest Backup

SnapProtect provides a single interface to provide NetApp snapshot backups for physical and virtual servers. Snapshots are hardware based recovery points on the production array. They are created almost instantly and with almost zero impact on the production environment.

NetApp Releases our First Virtual Storage Array!

On November 24th Fujitsu announced the global availability of the Primergy BX400 blade server. The Primergy BX400 is a green ‘datacenter in a box’ that delivers the first NetApp virtual storage appliance (or VSA) running Data ONTAP-v. For my North American brethren who may not be familiar with Fujitsu, I'd like to share that Fujitsu is the 3rd largest IT services provider in the world behind HP & IBM and they are NetApp’s largest partner throughout EMEA.

The Primergy BX400 blade server is a 6U chassis that includes eight half-height server or storage blades and has a mid-plane with three different fabrics. The NetApp VSA is enabled via the SX960 storage blade, which in provides ten hot-pluggable 2.5-inch disks. The NetApp VSA runs Data ONTAP-v 8.0.1 and is powered by VMware ESX 4.1.

The VSA will provide storage stack management of local Fujitsu disks while also providing IP-based data access (CIFS, iSCSI, NFS) for VMware datastores, home directories, and business applications for small and medium (SMB) size companies.

 

This ‘news’ isn’t news to those who attended NetApp Insight in Las Vegas, Prague, or Macau, where the VSA obtained a significant amount of attention. Actually it is because of the Insight sessions that I had to wait to publish this post. Suffice to say, Insight is over and I'd like to share with you why the release of our first VSA is huge news...

ONTAP is ONTAP

First the VSA is a prime example of the flexibility and evolution of our unified storage architecture. Data ONTAP-v is a fully compatible with NetApp data management tools and integration with physical FAS arrays, vSeries virtualization gateways (for 3rd party arrays), and the IBM N-Series. Architecturally speaking Data ONTAP and Data ONTAP-v run the same code-line.

Obviously I'm not trying to marginalize the engineering efforts required to bring this technology to market; however, as 'ONTAP is ONTAP' customers considering Primergy will be able to leverage our portfolio of integrations and functionality with VMware. As an example...

NetApp Releases Unified Adapter for VMware SRM

Last week I presented this topic at the VMware TechSummit, and today I am happy to share with all of that NetApp has released version 1.4.3 of our VMware Site Recovery Manager adapter (available for download here). The new adapter is our 'Unified Adapter' replaces the SAN & NAS adapters (versions 1.4.2 & 1.0.0.4 respectively) with a single adapter.

With this adapter we support NFS, iSCSI, FC, FCoE, FAS & vSeries 2000, 3000, 3100, 6000 series, IP & FC replication, and synchronous, a-synchronous, and semi-synchronous replication.

 

The Unified Adapter also supports replication of FAS to FAS, FAS to vFiler, vFiler to vFiler, FAS to vSeries, and vSeries to vFiler. Remember all NetApp arrays support bi-directional replication, so there's no need to provision single purpose arrays (as in one for production and another for DR).

In addition to all of the combinations shared above, one can also run a FC storage network in one datacenter and failover to an Ethernet storage network with SRM. With all of this flexibility I like to refer to this release as 'one adapter to rule them all.'

Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0 is Available!

Mike Laverick has released the much-anticipated Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0 book. I’m very confident when I say there isn’t another SRM book that is as comprehensive as this one.

I’m assuming everyone knows Mike’s body of work with rtfm-ed.co.uk & SearchVMware.com and those who follow him on Twitter, but for the few whom may not, you need to. Mike has also created my new web obsession, the 'Chinwag'. If you haven’t caught a 'ChinWag' may I suggest you start with the one with yours truly.

VMware SRM 4.0 and NetApp SRA 1.4 Details

This week VMware and NetApp released new versions of SRM and the SRA which add support for vSphere and the rapidly expanding NFS install base. I'm sure many have questions regarding this much anticipated release and if you are one of these you are in luck! Yesterday our SRM expert Larry Touchette has published an in-depth post that covers the details, which can be found here.

vSphere on NetApp Best Practices Released

I am please to share with you that this morning our new Technical Report, TR-3749: vSphere on NetApp Storage Best Practices, has been released. I’d like to thank Mike Slisinger, Larry Touchette, and Peter Learmonth for all of their assistance in the production of this TR.

I’d like to take a few moments to share some of the core enhancements covered in the report.

Site Recovery Manager: It’s Not Just for VMs

A key goal at NetApp is advancing the value of storage in the virtual data center from the traditional model of highly available storage to a more advanced virtual object oriented model. This approach is unified in nature as it provides the traditional functions of high availability, high performance, and the traditional storage provisioning of LUNs and file shares while also expanding into the realm of management of virtualized objects by the virtualization administrative team.

By virtualized objects I am specifically speaking of the objects that a VMware admin care about such as VMs, Datastores, workflow automation tools such SRM or View Manager, etc. For this blog I’d like to share with you an example of the direction NetApp is taking storage virtualization by discussing how to integrate a NetApp NAS file server into a VMware SRM recovery plan.