Cisco Network Accelerated Serverless Backup

[stephen2615]

Greetings,

Is anyone actually using Cisco Network Accelerated Serverless Backup (NASB)? I have a project in the making of using HDS arrays and VTL's but in different datacenters.

When you read the sales blurb on NASB, it does look good especially in that remote datacenter backup model.

Is there any doco around that provided technical overviews of how it can be done. Eg, array at one site, NESB gets the data and throughs it across a Fibre Channel or IP network to the VTL.

Where would the SSM be in that model? Would you need one of them at each datacenter?

Cheers

Stephen

[stephen2615]

Boy am I getting confused now. Just to run this past you all.

If you are using CommVault as your backup software, then each server connected to the SAN can be configured as a Media Agent, and therefore can backup directly to the shared Virtual Tape Drives, reducing the network traffic.

So if we have say 100 servers attached to the SAN, we would need 100 media agents and I suppose a 100 connections to the backup library.

Serverless backup is a method of offloading backup procedures from a server so that the time ordinarily devoted to backup functions can be used to carry out other server tasks. Ordinarily, the amount of time that a server can devote to processing requests from applications is limited by the backup window - the amount of time that must be reserved for data backup. Serverless backup is a storage area network (SAN) solution that is designed to lead to lower hardware costs and improved time-effectiveness, scalability, and fault tolerance. A number of companies, including Legato, Veritas, EMC, and Computer Associates offer or are developing serverless backup products.

Does NASB remove this requirement? I really wish there was some decent white papers or road maps on this..

It seems that everyone can offer serverless backups but you need servers.

I have a meeting with the Cisco rep tomorrow. I hope he has some info.

Cheers

Stephen

[dmcloon]

Hi Stephen,

Serverless backup does not mean you can do backups with zero media/backup servers. It means the CPU intensive data moving aspect is offloaded to a third part copy device, in our case it is the NASB component running in an MDS SSM module that does the copy function. The MDS takes an Extended Copy SCSI command from the media/backup server and then does all the hard work of copying the data from disk to tape. You still need the media server to schedule the backups, maintain databases of what/when was backed up, schedule restores,etc. Because MDS is doing the hard work you can manage with many fewer backup servers. For some large companies that might have say a dozen high end backup servers, they could reduce the number they need to run by even half by using serverless backup software (eg commvault) and Cisco NASB.

Cheers

Dallas