EMC Avamar NDMP Acceleration plus Isilon Fast Incremental
EMC’s new Fast Incremental technology revolutionizes backup and recovery for Isilon Scale-Out NAS. This new feature coupled with EMC Avamar NDMP client 7.1 performs backups up to 3x faster.
Large Scale-Out NAS systems can be so large, that a file system walk to identify changes in support of Level 1 incremental backups could run over into production hours in order to complete. Fast Incremental is brand new Isilon technology based on the NDMP protocol that eliminates the file system walk required to determine any incremental changes between backups. Let’s walk (pun intended) through the NAS backup steps:
Step 1: A Level-0 full backup request is made to Isilon. The NAS system will send all file data to the Avamar NDMP Accelerator for deduplication. The unique data is then sent to EMC Protection Storage (EMC Data Domain system or Avamar Data Store). This process can take many days to complete based on the amount of data stored on the NAS system. The Level-0 request is made only once and never needed again.
Step 2: A Level-1 incremental backup request is made to Isilon. Only changed files are sent by Isilon to the NDMP Accelerator for deduplication. This is a much faster process and often completes in hours. After the Level-1 backup is complete, Isilon takes a snapshot where it is maintained until the next Level-1 request.
Step 3: Upon the next Level-1 request by Avamar, a snapshot of the current backup is compared to the snapshot of the previous snapshot, so the differences can be identified. Now only the differences are immediately identified and sent to the NDMP Accelerator for deduplication without the overhead and time intensive aspects of the file system walk.
EMC Avamar 7.1 enables the Fast Incremental automatically on the Isilon device based on detecting the OneFS version (v7.1.1 is the latest release with Fast Incremental).
Please note that the Avamar 7.1 client is compatible with the Avamar server versions 7.1, 7.0 and 6.1.
Please visit http://www.emc.com/backup-and-recovery/avamar/avamar.htm for more information, and be sure to contact EMC Data Protection & Availability Systems Specialists.
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