Advanced Snapshots
In any storage system, the one feature that is of paramount importance to the user is data protection. Along with the idea that data will not be lost due to a system crash or a design bug, the administrator and users also expect that a storage system will protect them from inadvertent deletions, unwanted modifications, malicious agents, and the like.
To keep data safe and protected, a wide variety of data backup solutions exists in the storage industry. Perhaps the most common method of data protection is through scheduling data backups at regular intervals, either on the storage system itself, or to tape media. This method is virtually foolproof in terms of the data integrity it provides, but is burdened with the major disadvantages of requiring massive storage capacity, and causing substantial service disruptions during the backup period.
Because server backups have the potential to disrupt operation or drain bandwidth and/or performance, they are often performed overnight or other periods of slow / low server traffic, which can require additional resources outside of normal working hours. Moreover, as a result of these disadvantages, it is typically impossible to schedule backups more frequently than about once a day, causing a potentially large window of data loss if a restore must be made.
In response to the drawbacks involved with simple reliance on daily (or nightly) tape or drive backups, data snapshots are rapidly being adopted as an industry-wide standard for protecting data with increasingly fine granularity. Whether they are captured according to a schedule or under the direction of an administrator, a data snapshot involves the storage system takes point-in time images, or ‘snapshots,’ of the contents of a volume in a storage system. In a way, each snapshot is similar to an incremental backup of the data within the system. What distinguishes snapshots is the manner in which they back up data, and their positive impact on space utilization and system performance.
The snapshot implementation offered in the StorTrends iTX software by American Megatrends, featured in every StorTrends IP-SAN and NAS appliance, can be considered one of the premier snapshot implementations in the industry. StorTrends provides all of the above features, at a minimum performance premium, with minimal wastage of space, and with almost no performance impact or data degradation. At this time, no other implementation has been able to improve on such phenomenal snapshot performance.
