Veeam Backup & Replication Introduction to Unstructured Data NAS Solutions
NAS Backup and Unstructured Data Challenges
Network-attached storage (NAS) has come a long way from its humble beginnings. Among these changes, scalability has also evolved. Now, you can provide network file sharing (NFS) or Server Message Block (SMB) protocols for relevant workloads, thereby achieving scalability through production NAS devices. As a result, unstructured data is currently measured in petabytes (PB) and continues to increase. Today, NAS applications are becoming increasingly widespread, including applications, large unstructured data sets, and virtualization. Users create a large amount of unstructured data every day, including documents, presentations, graphics, etc., and IoT devices generate massive amounts of data all the time.
Unstructured data and NAS challenges
• Rapid growth: The increase in unstructured data has led to a rise in the number of storage files and folders. • Due to the growing amount of unstructured data, many files are now rich-media files (such as videos, graphics, etc.) and are constantly increasing.
• Businesses extend the data retention period not only for the sake of recovery, but also to maintain compliance.
• Users and devices are constantly generating unstructured data, and the lack of necessary regulation leads to the disorderly growth of data. Although NDMP is designed to address the issue of unstructured data, its structure has not been optimized for the current massive amount of unstructured data generated.
• In 1996, the NDMP technology emerged, taking on the mission of addressing the issues related to unstructured data.
• The Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) has a rigid structure and usually only supports full data backup. It can handle the data volume of the 1990s, but it cannot meet the current requirements.
• In 2010, NDMP “ceased development”.
However, many backup vendors still need NDMP!
Why use the Veeam solution to handle unstructured NAS data?
• Through the innovative file change tracking function, accelerate the incremental backup of commercial hardware and provide scalable protection for unstructured file data.
• Easily distribute to the cloud, and flexibly store unstructured NAS data on lower-cost storage.
• The comprehensive recovery options include complete shared recovery for handling the complete loss of hardware or NAS migration, time-point sharing rollback to facilitate rapid recovery from ransomware attacks, and file-level recovery (with a global search function that supports daily operation restoration).
NAS backup in Veeam Backup & Replication
Veeam® Backup & Replication,It will comprehensively transform and simplify the protection of unstructured file data and file servers. It offers powerful new features that help to flexibly protect and recover NAS data, and significantly reduces storage costs and improves recovery speed. Veeam’s NAS backup mission is very clear. • Provide simple and powerful NAS backup, which can quickly protect unstructured data through a simple wizard-driven method and handle PB-level data as soon as possible. Build a flexible solution to meet workload requirements and demands across multiple NAS and file server products. This includes flexible backup and recovery options and fine-grained options.
• Reliability is crucial. It not only protects massive amounts of data, but also ensures data consistency and efficiency.
differentiation advantage
flexibility
There are various types of NAS systems, which use numerous protocols and versions to manage unstructured data. With Veeam Backup & Replication NAS backup, we can not only protect SMB and NFS shares, but also protect Windows file servers and Linux file servers.
File Change Tracking
Veeam Backup & Replication NAS备份给这些充满挑战的 NAS 环境带来了灵丹妙药，即文件变化跟踪。该功能允许您对我们的 NAS环境执行快速增量备份，从而轻松实现备份目标。
支持快照
Veeam Backup & Replication has brought a panacea to these challenging NAS environments with its feature of file change tracking. This function enables you to perform fast incremental backups in our NAS environment, thus facilitating the achievement of backup goals.
Veeam NAS Backup Principle
First, there is file proxy. File proxy is an important “medium” for achieving data throughput from the source to the destination. They are scalable and defined by software, and can be expanded without the need for new hardware or specialized equipment.
Its “killer feature” is file change tracking. It can save the occupied space for shared source files and store them in a cache repository. The cache repository can track all the objects that have changed between each backup, thereby enabling extremely fast backup processing.
In terms of storage backup, NAS backup supports different backup repositories of the same range as image-based backup, including the Scale-Out Backup Repository™. However, since we focus on the backup of unstructured data in the NAS engine, we want to ensure that older files are layered onto lower-cost storage types, such as deduplication devices or object storage. This approach can keep short-term retention within a few days close to the production data set, but to meet regulatory and retention requirements, you can utilize public cloud for long-term retention and archiving.
Veeam Backup & Replication NAS backup also enables the storage of off-site copies of NAS data. This may employ a completely different retention period and use a separate encryption key to enhance security, and can be used as a disaster recovery (DR) option when restoring unstructured data.
restoration function
1 Restore the entire share
This option is most useful when the file sharing is completely lost or suffers from a severe interruption event. It supports restoring the latest versions of all files to their original location or to a backup with enhanced security and permissions.
2 Rollback to a certain point in time
Quick rollback enables you to roll back to the last known reliable configuration or backup, meaning that all files modified since the last backup can be restored. Let’s take a look at an example related to ransomware attacks and file sharing encryption. This option enables you to roll back to the last reliable backup before the ransomware attack occurred.
3 Restore individual files and folders
This restore type is simple in design, similar to performing file-level recovery from an image-level backup. It supports restoring individual files and folders by overwriting the real-time system or by saving two backups. Easily select a specific restore point with higher visibility, view all available file versions, and simply and flexibly choose the desired restore version.
epilogue
Now is the best time to leverage NAS backup with features that are faster, more powerful, smarter and more superior than ever before. Click here to learn more about NAS backup, or download the new features document. Start using the free trial version of VeeamBackup & Replication immediately to fully utilize this feature and the other 150 outstanding enhancements!