N7000 near-line storage capabilities
The N7000 is well suited for near-line storage configurations. An N7000 sys tem populated with Fibre Channel disk drives that backs up to another
N series system populated with SATA disk drives offers disk-to-disk backup capabilities that are designed to help you fill the price/performance gap between fast but costly primary storage and less-costly but slow archival (tape and optical) storage. Utilizing SATA disk drive technology, you could achieve near-primary storage performance at near-tape storage costs. A disk-based, secondary storage device for enterprise applications, N7000 disk-to-disk envi ronments are designed to complement and dramatically improve existing tape backup, archiving and data protection schemes. They do so by inserting eco nomical and simple-to-use disk-based storage between application storage and tape libraries in a three-tier storage architecture.
This arrangement is designed to pro vide economical storage and rapid disk-based access to reference data to help address business and regulatory requirements. It can serve as a key
component in an information lifecycle management process by storing less- critical data on a device whose cost and performance stand between pri mary and tape storage.
Combined with SnapVault®, the N7000 disk-to-disk backup environments are designed to serve as a robust and fully integrated appliance that makes back ing up and restoring data rapid and reli able. Backing up directly to an N7000 system in a near-line storage configura tion and then to tape can help your organization enhance data protection management, improve primary storage and tape library performance, and reduce backup resource requirements and costs. Two N series systems oper ating in a disk-to-disk backup scenario are designed to be faster and to con sume less application-server CPU pro cessing power than direct backup to tape. SnapVault software can be used to help reduce network bandwidth con sumption by supporting incremental block transfers to backup data across a LAN or WAN. SnapMirror® software, which replicates data at high speeds over a LAN or a WAN, is designed to provide high data availability and
fast recovery for mission-critical applications.
IBM N series systems using NearStore® software can use the Advanced Single Instance Storage (A-SIS) software feature for better stor age utilization. A-SIS software enables N series systems to deduplicate stored data at the block level in order to con serve physical disk space when making disk-to-disk copies of primary data. Traditionally when copies of volumes are created, every duplicate data string is also copied, resulting in an inefficient use for secondary storage. A-SIS dedu plication helps eliminate this inefficiency.
Support for data retention through non
erasable, non-rewriteable security
capabilities
The N7000 offers multiple capabilities in the area of data retention. It can serve as a high-performance device for stor ing mission-critical production data and as a data-retention system by running SnapLock® software. The N7000 with SnapLock software is designed to deliver high-performance and high- security data permanence to disk- based nearline and primary N series storage. An optional feature of the proven Data ONTAP operating system, SnapLock software supports the accu racy, integrity and security of data.