NDMP

The NDMP agent provides a simplified end-to-end backup and recovery solution for the data residing on a NAS File Server. In addition to complete protection of file system data for disaster recovery, the NDMP agent also provides more granular backup and recovery options that operate seamlessly with your data protection. For an overview of the NAS solution, see the NAS Solutions white paper.

Key Features

The NDMP agent offers the following key features:

Comprehensive Backup and Restore Capabilities

The NDMP agent provides the flexibility to backup and restore the data residing on various file servers. You can perform a full, incremental, or differential backups of the data. The backup data can be restored to different environments such as file servers or client computers.

NDMP Topology (Model) Support

NDMP topologies are different models for how the source and destination of the backup data can be configured. The NDMP agent supports the following NDMP topologies:

• NDMP 2-way: The NAS file server with data to be backed up is directly connected to the backup media, such as a tape drive. The file server copies data directly to the media. In this model, backup data is not sent over the network. Only indexing data is sent over the network to the MediaAgent.

• NDMP 3-way: The NAS file server with the data to be backed up and the backup media are on different servers. In this model, backup data is sent from the source file server over the network to the destination server. Indexing data is also sent over the network to the MediaAgent.

• NDMP 3-way (NDMP Remote): Backup data and indexing data are both sent over the network to a MediaAgent, which then controls the flow of the data to backup media.

Point-in-Time Recovery

In the event of a serious system failure, such as the breakdown of hardware, software, or operating systems, the NDMP agent provides Point-in-Time recovery of files at any given time.

File System Restore

You can restore NDMP data from a file server to a Windows or Unix client computer. A file system restore is a cross-platform restore, where the data is restored to a computer with a different operating system. For example, data from a NetApp file server running ONTAP can be restored to a Windows computer.

Efficient Job Management and Reporting

You can view and verify the status of the backup and recovery operations from the Job Controller and Event Viewer windows within the CommCell Console. You can also track the status of the jobs using reports, which can be saved and easily distributed. Reports can be generated for different aspects of data management. You also have the flexibility to customize the reports to display only the required data and save them to any specified location in different formats. For example, you can create a backup job summary report to view at-a-glance the completed backup jobs.

In addition, you can also schedule these reports to be generated and send them on email without user intervention.

Block Level Deduplication

Deduplication provides a smarter way of storing data by identifying and eliminating the duplicate items in a data protection operation.

Deduplication at the data block level compares blocks of data against each other. If an object (file, database, etc.) contains blocks of data that are identical to each other, then block level deduplication eliminates storing the redundant data and reduces the size of the object in storage. This way dramatically reduces the backup data copies on both the disk and tapes.

Terminology

The NDMP documentation uses the following terminology: