dsmISI MAGS

Large Scale NAS Backup

Fast backup and restore of large production file services (large filers or other file systems containing hundreds of millions or even billions of objects in combination with IBM Storage Protect or directly to Dell PowerScale.

Backing up file systems is a relatively simple task - in theory. You use backup software to do regular full and incremental backups and if individual files or your file system is lost, you run restores. It gets a lot more complex when that file system grows to millions or even billions of files and directories.

The Challenge 

Full backups are no longer an option because they consume huge amounts of time and storage capacity. Incremental backups take more and more time to complete because of the sheer mass of data such a process has to sift through. Even backup software that is capable of performing "incremental forever" backups (such as IBM Storage Protect) is at some point no longer useable due to the overhead associated with comparing the live file system to what's been backed up before, taking days or weeks to complete despite only having to move relatively small amounts of data.

The Workaround

Proposed remedies to this issue often skip backup altogether and simply rely on replication to another storage product from the same vendor, often necessitating a level of trust in the product's capabilities that throws the need for backing up at all into question. Having another copy on the same, proprietary technology may protect from local disasters and are helpful to solve the need for high availability but are ultimately not sufficient to substitute backup.

The Solution

dsmISI MAGS is using incremental forever backup to either IBM Storage Protect or directly to Dell PowerScale without ever having to perform another full backup. It is using massively parallel processing to handle almost any amount of data - even if it comprises billions of files - in a timely manner (usually within a regular backup windows i.e. 8 hours).

When used with IBM Storage Protect, MAGS is utilizing the regular Storage Protect Client (dsmc) so there is no change in data format. MAGS can be based on existing backups without having to run new full backups and without changing data structures. Node names, filespace names etc. stay exactly as they were with Storage Protect before - the only difference is a vastly improved performance for backup and restore. Data backed up with MAGS can be restored using MAGS or the regular Storage Protect client on Windows and/or Linux. Any file system supported by the respective IBM Storage Protect client may be backed up with MAGS, incl. SMB/CIFS and NFS.

When used directly with Dell PowerScale (MAGS Direct), IBM Storage Protect is not required. MAGS Direct is replicating all changes from the file system it is backing up massively optimized with multiple parallel streams directly to a respective share or export on a PowerScale cluster. It then runs automated snapshots on that cluster to provide full, capacity efficient versioning and optionally copies new data to a secondary PowerScale cluster. In addition to restoring data even faster than from a Storage Protect backend, MAGS Direct can provide direct access to the latest or a previous version of a backup through SMB/CIFS or NFS, thus enabling instant recovery with user access to data while the restore is still running.