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vRanger 7.8.5 - Integration Guide for DR Series Disk Backup Appliance

Getting started Understanding the Quest DR Series Installing and configuring your Quest DR Series Installing vRanger Maintaining your DR Series appliance

Deduplication and compression

The DR Series design uses various data-reduction technologies, including advanced deduplication algorithms, in addition to the generic and custom compression solutions that prove effective across many differing file types. Data deduplication and compression is addressed in the following areas:

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DR Series appliances: The DR Series backup and recovery appliances provide both efficient and high-performance disk-based data protection to leverage the advanced deduplication and compression capabilities in the DR Series software. Based on technology that is now part of the Quest Data Protection strategy, the DR Series provides a key component that performs backup, recovery, and data protection operations.
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Deduplication: This technology eliminates redundant copies of data and in the process it decreases disk capacity requirements and reduces the bandwidth needed for data transfer. Deduplication can be a major asset for companies that are dealing with increasing data volumes and require a means for optimizing their data protection.
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Compression: This technology reduces the size of data that is stored, protected, and transmitted. Compression helps companies improve their backup and recovery times while helping reduce infrastructure and network resource constraints.

In general, the DR Series appliances are Purpose Built Backup Appliances (PBBA) that offer advanced deduplication and compression capabilities to reduce the time and cost associated with backing up and restoring data. Based on deduplication and compression technology, the DR Series eliminates the need to maintain multiple copies of the same data. This product lets customers keep more data online longer and reduce the need for tape backup dependency.

Using its deduplication and compression technology, the DR Series can help achieve an expected data reduction ratio of 15:1. Achieving this reduction in data means that you need fewer incremental storage operations to run and it provides you with a smaller backup footprint. By removing redundant data, the DR Series deliver fast reliable backup and restore functionality, reduce media usage and power and cooling requirements, and improve your overall data protection and retention costs.

You can extend the benefits of data deduplication across the enterprise as well — using the DR Series deduplication replication function — to provide a complete backup solution for multi-site environments. With 32:1 deduplicated replication, up to 32 DR Series appliances can be replicated simultaneously to separate, individual containers on one central DR Series appliance. The DR Series uses compression with replication to shrink the data that is needed to be moved across the wire to a container.

Replication

Replication is the process by which the same key data is saved from multiple storage locations, with the goal being to maintain consistency between redundant resources in data storage environments. Data replication improves the level of fault-tolerance, which improves the reliability of maintaining saved data and permits accessibility to the same stored data. The DR Series system uses an active form of replication that lets you configure a primary-backup scheme. During replication, the system processes data storage requests from a specified source to a specified replica target, which acts as a replica of the original source data. This replica can then be cascaded optionally to a third location called a Cascaded replica for an additional copy.

 
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NOTE: It is important to distinguish the difference between data that has been processed by backup, and data that has been processed by replication. This distinction is because backup saves a copy of data that generally remains unchanged for a long time.

Replicas and Cascaded replicas are read-only and are updated with new or unique data during scheduled or manual replications. The DR Series system can be considered to act as a form of a storage replication process in which the backup and deduplication data is replicated in real time or using a scheduled window in a network environment. In a replication relationship between two or three DR Series systems, this configuration means that a relationship exists between several systems. One system acts as the source and the other as a replica, with an optional third cascaded replica if you have chosen to keep two instances of replicated data in your backup workflow.

Supported protocols

The DR Series supports the following file system protocols:

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Network File System (NFS)
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Common Internet File System (CIFS)
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Rapid Data Access (RDA)
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Rapid Data Storage (RDS)
 
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NOTE: The DR Series supports three container connection types: NFS, CIFS, and RDA. RDS provides a logical disk interface that can be used with network storage devices to store data and support data storage operations.

Rapid Data Access (RDA)

RDA is developed by Quest and provides a logical disk interface for use with network storage devices. RDS allows for better coordination and integration between DR Series backup, restore, and optimized duplication operations with vRanger and Quest NetVault Backup.

The DR Series and vRanger integration is done using the Rapid OFS (ROFS) plug-in developed by Quest. The ROFS plug-in allows vRanger control over backup image creation, deletion, and duplication. RDS allows deduplication operations to happen on the client-side so that network traffic can be reduced.

The RDS protocol allows the supported backup applications to communicate directly with the DR Series and determine whether a specific chunk of data exists on the system. If the data exists, only the pointers need to be updated on the DR Series, and the duplicate chunk of data does not need to be transferred to the system. This process provides two benefits: it improves the overall backup speed, and also reduces the network load.

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