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Network Appliance made a couple of bold moves last year designed to make the company a player in the lucrative disk-to-disk backup space. Based on the quality and functionality of its new NearStore VTL600, NetApp is well on its way.
Click here to read the full review of NearStore VTL600.
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Network Appliance made a couple of bold moves last year designed to make the company a player in the lucrative disk-to-disk backup space. Based on the quality and functionality of its new NearStore VTL600, NetApp is well on its way.
The first fruit from NetApps acquisition of Alacritus Software, the VTL600 is a successful blend of Alacritus VTL (virtual tape library) software and NetApps appliance hardware. Another shrewd move made by NetApp last year was the purchase of security appliance specialist Decru, whose products can be easily integrated with the VTL600 to create secure backups.
eWEEK Labs tests show that the NearStore VTL600, released this month, is a solid backup device that should make NetApp a viable provider of D2D (disk to disk) backup technology. And, with the addition of VTL capabilities, it will be much easier for NetApp to sell into mature enterprise environments that have already invested heavily in their backup infrastructure and procedures over the years.
Indeed, its the seamless nature of VTL technology that has vendors suddenly flooding the market with solutions.
The VTL600, for example, can create and present VTL units that existing backup software packages can easily detect and write backup jobs to. When backup jobs are written, the protected data is segmented into discrete virtual tape cartridges that can be identified and retrieved by the media management software found in backup packages. The virtual tapes and cartridges function in the same way that physical ones do, so IT staffers charged with restoring and backing up data for clients can continue to use the recovery tools with which they are familiar.
As a result, VTL allows IT managers to get the performance and convenience of disk-based backup without having to go through the implementation pain of retraining personnel to use new tools.
Familiar terrain
The VTL600s hardware is identical to that of NetApps popular FAS 3000 midrange appliance and disk shelves.
With a minimum capacity of 4.5TB and an entry price of $114,000, the VTL600 clearly is targeted at large enterprises. The device has a maximum capacity of 54TB, and it can create as many as 256 virtual libraries, 1,500 virtual tape drives and 10,000 virtual cartridges. The VTL600s standard configuration has four disk shelves and can back up data at rates close to 500MB per second.
For shops that need even more storage and performance, theres the NearStore VTL1200, which comes with two head units and can scale to 108TB, 512 virtual libraries and 20,000 virtual cartridges.
Best of breed
To optimize the performance of the VTL600, NetApp chose to run Alacritus specially tuned file system instead of its standard WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) file system. The file system NetApp inherited from Alacritus was built specifically to deal with the large sequential read/write requests commonly found in backup environments.
Next Page: Metadata, load balancing and Smart Sizing.
Metadata, Load Balancing and
Smart Sizing”>
Another interesting facet of the VTL600s file system is that it embeds metadata into each of its disk streams. As a result, if a head unit dies, an IT manager can plug the disk shelves into a new VTL600 to quickly rebuild its metadata repository.
The VTL600s metadata repository is used to locate specific backup jobs with the VTL.
The VTL600 hooks into a backup SAN (storage area network) using Fibre Channel ports on the head unit. After we created a virtual library using the VTL600s management tool, the Symantec Veritas NetBackup 6.0 media management server with which we were testing was able to quickly locate the new VTL and write backup jobs to it.
The load balancing intelligence built into the VTL600 automatically distributes the load from incoming backup streams to the four disk shelves. This is the first VTL system weve seen with this kind of load balancing capability.
The VTL600 lacks data deduplication capabilities such as those found in Avamar Technologies and Data Domains VTL products. Deduplication technology eliminates redundant files and minimizes the amount of data stored when files are updated.
However, the VTL600 does have a feature called Smart Sizing that will increase storage efficiency.
Smart Sizing can be used to intelligently set up virtual tape sizes. When backups are written to tape, the type of tape drive used and the properties of the data being backed up determine the amount of compression that can be achieved.
For example, while little or no compression may be possible when backing up a .zip file, compression ratios of 3-1 could be achieved when backing up a database or text files. This will help IT managers minimize management and acquisition costs for tapes.
The VTL600 also can migrate tapes directly to a physical tape library by writing the virtual tape images stored on its disks to the tapes on an attached tape library. This not only reduces the migration load on media servers but also allows IT managers to maintain consistent bar codes between virtual and physical tapes. With other library solutions, such as Data Domains DD400 Enterprise Series, IT managers need to use the tape cloning functionality in their backup media servers to migrate data from virtual tapes to physical tapes for off-site storage or long-term archiving.
The VTL600 offers three different migration techniques for creating physical tapes: The Copy and Replace method turns a virtual tape into a physical one when data reaches a specific age and automatically deletes the original virtual tape; the Clone and Replace method immediately creates a physical tape when a virtual tape is completed and automatically deletes the virtual tape; and the Clone and Offsite method retains the virtual tape but creates a clone that can be sent off-site for disaster recovery purposes.
Next Page: Evaluation shortlist.
Evalution Shortlist
EVALUATION SHORTLIST
Data Domains DD400 Enterprise Series Disk-based backup appliance with deduplication capabilities; a VTL feature was recently added as an option (www.datadomain.com)
FalconStor Softwares VirtualTape Library SAN-attached VTL appliance that allows IT managers to use existing storage resources; available with either Fibre Channel or iSCSI connectivity (www.falconstor.com/vtl.asp)
Senior Analyst Henry Baltazar can be reached at [email protected].
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