No More Fishing For Data Protection In The Isilon Data Lake

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It’s been almost 2 weeks since our announcement about the latest OneFS release and our support of the new capabilities for data protection with Isilon.  The response from new prospects and existing customers has been tremendous.  I wanted to recap what was announced and the improvements you can expect with these exciting new platforms and integration features.

Today’s enterprise customers demand storage infrastructures that provide the scale, performance, and ease-of-use Isilon products are known for.  Whether the need is a Data Lake for Big Data applications or simply providing the most cost-effective NAS platform for storing files, Isilon delivers new capabilities to extend its lead in the new mobile, agile world.  Release 7.1.1 of OneFS adds more capabilities to enhance Data Protection of Isilon as well.

EMC Avamar and NetWorker exploit these new features to deliver faster, more manageable backups.

Watch Alex Almeida discuss the benefits of these new Isilon features coupled with the Data Protection backup products

NDMP Acceleration

Provides the industry’s only NDMP multi-streaming backup with deduplicated daily level-1 backups built into daily full backups in a fraction of the time compared to traditional solutions. With OneFS release 7.1.1 integration, Avamar leverages OneFS’ ability to identify daily changes faster than walking the file system. This provides up to a 3x faster backup.  You can read more about this in this blog post.

Centralized snapshot management and recovery

Management of snapshots and related policies is simple with NetWorker Snapshot Management. The NetWorker Management Console (NMC) provides a single pane of glass for data protection administration of snapshots and backup including snapshot creation and replication, policy-based retention, rollover to protection storage, monitoring and reporting for both file and block-based storage. NetWorker uniquely discovers snapshots already created by the storage administrator and adds them to the centralized catalog along with those created using NetWorker, enabling a universal view of snapshots in the environment. These snapshots can be rolled over to protection storage, used for recovery, and are included in reporting.  A wizard simplifies configuration of snapshots and backups, alleviating the backup administrator from compulsory in-depth knowledge of the storage device.

Recovering from a snapshot is also quite simple using the Recovery UI within the NMC.  Data recovery can also be granular, enabling storage administrators to recover entire volumes or individual files.

Performance and Scalability

Data Domain systems offer the performance and scalability necessary to handle big data workloads.  Isilon scale-out NAS storage allows for massive data growth and offers industry-leading performance.  Big datasets stored on Isilon require fast, efficient, and scalable data protection.  Data Domain systems are highly scalable protection storage with deduplication technology that reduces storage requirements by 10 to 30x.  With throughput of up to 31 TB/hr, Data Domain enables more backups to complete sooner reducing pressure on limited backup windows. In addition, the Data Domain Data Invulnerability Architecture provides the industry’s best defense against data integrity issues ensuring data is recoverable and accessible.

As you can see, the Data Protection products are delivering real value for our customers leveraging Isilon and the rest of the EMC platforms.  Read about just one example, Trek Bicycles, and how they transformed their Data Protection and business intelligence with Avamar, Data Domain, and Isilon.

About the Author: J. P. Corriveau