Hello, and welcome to this video tutorial on how to use snapshots and cloning with the FS8600 NAS Appliance.
This is one of a series of videos designed to demonstrate some of the features and functionality of the Fluid FS8600 NAS appliance. Let's get started.
So, what is a FluidFS Snapshot? It is a point in time, "frozen", read-only view of a NAS volume. A snapshot can be thought of as a copy of the data that is frozen in time, and that snapshot is then available immediately.
Since snapshots are read-only, they can be used to create a clone of a NAS volume. This cloned NAS volume can then be used much the same way as a regular volume is used.
Snapshots can be taken manually by the administrator at any time or a snapshot schedule can be created for automatic snapshot creation.
Snapshots can be retained for an indefinite period of time, and can also be expired either manually or by creating a retention schedule. What are some of the benefits of snapshots?
Since snapshots are a point in time to which data can be restored and you can take multiple snapshots, you can also have multiple points in time to choose from if the need arises to restore the volume.
Although a snapshot is a point in time of an entire NAS volume, users have the ability to recover their own files and folders. Only files and folders that they have rights to are displayed and available for recovery.
The administrator can quickly restore an entire volume from any of the snapshots that have been taken. This helps the administrator maintain an RPO, or Recovery Point Objective, for the users of the NAS volume by providing specific points in time the volume can be recovered.
This is in case of corruption or damage to the data. The administrator can clone a NAS volume from a snapshot to create a read/write NAS volume from the point in time the snapshot was created.
This is useful anytime you need a read/write copy of a NAS volume at a specific point in time. Let's go ahead and create a snapshot. I have a NAS cluster here called "Dell Primary" and I've created a volume called "Production Files".
I've put some data on this volume. I've copied approximately 12 GB to this volume. To create a snapshot, I highlight the volume, right-click down to "Snapshots", and select "Create Snapshot".
I can take one of these any time I want to, manually. When the screen pops up, you can name it what you would like. I can also enable expiration of the snapshot by simply clicking this button, and then picking the date and/or time that I would like to expire the snapshot.
By expiring, that means that the system will automatically delete the snapshot based on the time and date you enter here. It's important to consider using expiration or manually delete snapshots because snapshots will consume space on a volume.
In this case, I'm going to disable that box, and I'll click "OK". After I've created the snapshot, I can view it in "Enterprise Manager". Click on the "Snapshots" tab and see that the snapshot has been created.
Here's the "Name", the creation date and time, and the "Size Written". Since this is the first snapshot I've taken of this volume, notice that the size written is equal to the used space of the volume.
I've copied approximately 450 MB of additional files onto the "Production Files" volume. Let's go ahead and take another snapshot. I'll call this snapshot "snap 2".
Notice that the second snapshot I created is equal to the amount of data that I copied in to the "Production Files" volume after the first snapshot. This represents the modified blocks of data.
I can use snapshots to restore a volume to a previous point in time. To restore a volume to a previous point in time where the snapshot was created, I right-click on the snapshot and click "Restore NAS Volume".
Note, that this will remove any subsequent snapshots and the data that was captured on them will be deleted. So far, we've created manual snapshots.
I'm going to show you how to do this automatically by creating a snapshot schedule. To create a snapshot schedule, I make sure that the "Snapshots" tab is highlighted, go over to the right-hand part of the screen and click "Create Snapshot Schedule".
This screen comes up. I can create a "Scheduled Name". I can now, based on a period of time, select how often I want a snapshot to occur. Either hours, days or weeks, or minutes down to one minute.
If I just want snapshots to occur on a daily basis, I can select the days of the week and/or at a specific time. I can also choose when or how long to retain that snapshot, and then expire it.
For this snapshot, I want a snapshot to be taken every hour. I also only want to retain eight hours' worth of snapshots, so I will enable "Retention" and I will set "Expiration" to eight hours.
I showed earlier how to recover an entire volume at a specific point in time from a snapshot. But snapshots can also be used to recover users' individual files.
Consider users' home directories as a use case for this. I've created a volume called "Home_Users" that I use for home users' directories. I've created a snapshot, and I've also created a snapshot schedule that takes snapshots on this volume every 15 minutes.
I've brought up "Windows Explorer" and I'm accessing my "Home Share". When I double-click and access the share you can see I have two folders in there.
One called "New Folder", one called "Program Files". I'm going to go ahead and delete the one called "New Folder". To access previously used versions, I can highlight the "Share", right-click and click on "Restore previous versions".
Notice here now that I've got five different snapshots that I can choose from, and they are ordered by time. The oldest snapshots are always on the bottom.
So, if I wanted to go from the oldest snapshot, I'd click on the very bottom one. You can see now the folder "New Folder", the one that I deleted, is available to me.
I can simply copy that and paste it into the original location. When I take a snapshot of a volume, it copies the entire contents of the volume.
However, you can see here during the previous example, that all the user was able to access were the files that he had access to. I've logged in as the user "Ted".
Ted also has a home directory share, and he can access the snapshots we took in the same way. Right-click on the folder in question. Click on "Previous Versions" and you can see that Ted now has access to the same five snapshots.
Ted can recover any files from his home directory that he has rights to see. Notice, that if I open up one of these snapshots, I can't see any of the other files that A. Smith can see. Snapshots will consume space on the volume.
The amount of space that they consume is a function of the data change rate from the snapshot that you take also, the frequency of the snapshots taken.
Another thing that affects the amount of space is the number of retained snapshots. So, as a best practice, make sure you delete snapshots that you don't need.
I can also configure an alert to be triggered when snapshot space starts to consume too much space. To do this, select the volume you'd like to create the alert on.
Go up and click "Edit Volume Space Settings". And on the bottom of this window, you want to enable "Snapshot Space Consumption". And then pick a number that suits your preference based on when you want the snapshot alert threshold to be triggered.
In this case, I'll pick 50%. Be sure to check out the next part of this video where we'll discuss the setup and configuration of clones. For more information about snapshots, please look into the "FS8600 Appliance Administrator’s Guide".
You can also visit the FluidFS section of Dell Tech Center at the address listed on your screen. Thanks for watching.
